


Stranded

by Livia_LeRynn



Series: Rolling Stones Turn to Sand (if They Don't Find a Place to Stand) [5]
Category: Faerie Folklore, Mad Max Series (Movies), Slavic Mythology & Folklore
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Because Buzzards, British Isles folklore, Camping, Can be platonic if that's how you roll, Canon-Typical Injuries, Canon-Typical Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Developing Relationship, Drowning, Euthanasia, F/M, Fight Scenes, Folklore, Furiosa POV, Gen, Gore, Guilt, Halloween Special, Hallucinations, Horror, Huddling For Warmth, Light Hurt/Comfort, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Romance, Russian Folklore, Slavic mythology, Small supernatural animals would die if they weren't supernatural, Snuggling, Supernatural Elements, Violence to pregnant character, Vomiting, Wasteland Magic, Wasteland folklore, canon-typical mental health episodes, folklore mashup, intimacy is scary, past trauma, road war, spooky shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-28
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-08-24 08:40:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 23,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8365450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Livia_LeRynn/pseuds/Livia_LeRynn
Summary: Max and Furiosa spend a night in the wastes while they wait for a tow, but they aren't the only ones stranded.
This was supposed to be a quiet, little camping fic, but it had other plans. It became a Halloween special, and then it continued its own kind of spooky weird well into the holiday season, which is more than appropriate as it became a New Year's story kind of by accident.Prequel to Afternoon Drive





	1. No Stopping

Furiosa leans low on her bike as the convoy crosses over the southwestern border of Buzzard territory. She positions herself to the right rear of the Gigahorse and watches the hills rise and fall as she passes. They slope almost gently in steady undulations. Further west the hills gradually yield as they are swollowed by vast flatlands, but here the landscape is rich with hiding spots. 

Max is ahead in his Interceptor, leading the pack. His car kicks up a formidable dust storm, so he’s driving to the right of what would usually be the lead car position. The sleek shape is a dark silhouette against the retiring sun. Its long nose plows ahead with fearless determination and stubborn yet dignified resilience. 

And in the middle of the convoy, protected on all sides, locked away in the cargo holds of the only large vehicle to survive the Road War, is a treasure trove of single most valuable resource in the Wasteland: antibiotics. Furiosa’s heart quivers at the thought of the risk they are taking. They’ve traded an uncomfortable amount of food and fuel for some of the last drugs out of the last days of Melbourne. There’s more then a solid chance that they aren’t even still effective and that all efforts to obtain and transport them are in vain… But if they work! They would be more than worth their cost. Iris’s stores have sat empty for almost the last hundred and fifty days, and while Furiosa isn't sure the last doses went to her, she does know she’s used far more than her fair share. 

So Furiosa's orders are firm: no stopping, not for anyone. Piss off the rear bumper – she doesn’t care. Just get the drugs home; don’t risk them. Come back for survivors later. It was a hard sell, but eventually everyone agreed. 

The road is quiet. Furiosa only hears the hum of convoy charging across the open wastes. She’s missed the hum of the road in her bones. On a bike she can feel the vibrations running up through her core, stirring her to life, connecting her to the world. No wonder her Boys worship their engines.

But Buzzards are tricksy. They lie in wait.

The stillness breaks in the silence between two breaths. An explosion lifts the Interceptor off of the road. The car almost hovers for a time before crashing the side of its nose into the ground. This sets off another cloud of dust. Another mine sends the car tumbling down the a series of hills.

Furiosa tucks her chin and fangs towards the violence at an irresponsible speed. Her eyes fix on the flailing car through the visor of her helmet. Every curse she knows tumbles through her head. 

The Interceptor finally lands with a sickening crack in a shallow valley. The suspension’s fucked; she can tell that much from the defeated shape the body has taken. Its proud form now slumps over its wheels. There’s no way it can be fixed on the road. It will have to be towed or abandoned; these are the only options… 

“Keep going!” Furiosa flips up her visor and shouts to Leona as she passes the Gigahorse. 

“And you?” The Vuvalini asks from the right rear window.

“I’ll be here when you get back.”

“Don’t you go getting your ass blown up.”

“Likewise.”

The Vuvalini gives her a single nod of agreement then trains her rifle on the spiky cars emerging from the ground. Furiosa counts them as they rise: four. They are still not quite in reliable rifle range let alone thunderstick range with the way the ground dips and rises with who knows how any tunnels hiding away. If the Buzzards focus on taking the Interceptor and let the Gigahorse pass, they might not ever give her artillery any clear openings. 

“Can you fight off that many?” Leona asks.

“With your help. I’ll try and draw them closer.” She takes a long breath to calm herself and hold back frantic curses at the lack of her sniper rifle. “But no one follows me. Stay where the dust is shallow.” She closes her visor.

“Righto, girlie, Mothers be with you...”

Furiosa pulls ahead and off to the right where the dust is thicker. Then she slows; she's about where Max was when he was hit. She watches the ground. _Dead girls don't get home_ \- It’s become a kind of mantra over the kilodays even if now it means something entirely different now.

The Buzzards are circling. If they thought Max was incapacitated, they would have already struck. Buzzards are a predictable lot who despise shattered glass and wasted bullets. They'll take a clearshot if they get one; if not, they'll pop a door and smoke him out. That's assuming he's lucky… Taking cars from the dead is easier- just pick the lock on the door.

If only she can draw them off, he might have time to find his bearings. She turns so she's heading straight for them. The sunlight catches the polished metal of her arm exactly as she wants, but is the infamous Bag of Nails, Imperator and Demmortanizor a tempting enough prize? She's competing against a working V-8. She stops top of the closest hill and waits, a bold figure again silhouetted against a flame course sky. What's Moe’s Code for fuck you? She lifts her left arm and waves it in a dazzling show of chrome and shine and revs her engine like a war cry.

 _Pow-pfft!_ A bullet hits the ground just ahead of her tyres. _Good._ She fangs down the first hill and up the next. She turns right then left then right again, making sure to hold each position just long enough to present a tempting target. _pow-shh!_ Another bullet whizzes past her, this time to her left. 

She draws a pistol from beneath her handle bars and aims it at the front tyre of the nearest Buzzard car as she races across the hillcrest. She knows the instant she’s in perfect range for her weapons. She feels it like her gears engaging. She squeezes her trigger. The Buzzard car spins from the force of its blown-out tyre. 

Anther car turns to pursue her before the first stops spinning. It recklessly fangs past the first, but she has the higher ground. She splatters Buzzard brains against the rear windscreen. Then she picks off the driver and passenger from the first car – _And-a-one, and-a-two._.

But the remaining Buzzards have hooked chains to the Interceptor door. From the combined force of the two remaining cars, rusty and rickety as they are, the door pops off easily. 

Furiosa still hasn’t seen any activity from Max. What could possibly be taking him so long? “C’mon, c’mon, you fucking, rusty smeg!” She mutters under her breath.

It almost seems as if he heard her. A Buzzard flies back from the Interceptor as a shell explodes against his chest. She’d recognise that shitty shotgun anywhere. The Buzzard is stunned but still moving, writhing like a beatle on its back. _Fucking Buzzard armour!_ While the Buzzard staggers to kneeling, a bullet zips into the gap between shoulders and upturned chin. The Buzzard falls to a puddle of gurgling blood and jumbled armour. 

Furiosa calms the panic in her belly. He’s fine; Max’s fine… good enough at least. She chews her lip and chides herself for caring.

 _Bang!_ A spray of lead peppers her back tyre, kicking stones against her legs and sending her tumbling head over wheels. She reaches between her knees so she can roll off her left shoulder and slap out with her flesh arm, but the ground doesn’t come as quickly as she expects. There is no good way to land. She over rotates. The flat of her shoulder blade hits, jarring her entire body. She keeps rolling, feeling the every stone she crosses until she has finally slowed enough to stop the roll.

Pain blossoms in her left calf, first the slick and sharp sting of broken skin, then the round, throbbing fullness of blood moving through severed vessels, and finally the deep aching of damaged muscle. But there's no time, no time. She pulls her spare pistol from the holster in her gaiter. She holds the weapon close and ready as she crawls, her body low and sprawled along the hillside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Furiosa isn't driving the Gigahorse because she's still working a few kinks out of her mechanical hand. At least that's what she told everyone. What she doesn't say is how afraid she is that she will become like Joe.
> 
> Yes, antibiotics surviving this long is completely possible, just not tetracycline. Old tetracycline = bad. Source [Here](http://thesurvivaldoctor.com/2015/08/05/expired-antibiotics/)


	2. This One's Mine

Furiosa grits her teeth and draws a long, slow breath between her clenched jaws. She shoves back the broken visor of her helmet and briefly passes her pistol to her left hand so she can inventory the laceration on her left calf: not deep enough to bleed out, but the muscle is already spasming. All this, and her adrenaline is still going strong – her calf will be all but useless for days once the rush wears off. She’ll have to act quickly.

She moves as quietly as she can. _Let them think they got her…_ Still the sand grinds against her metal; it scraps and scratches as she moves. She wonders if Buzzards hear these sounds all the time – the fucking Buzzard armour' finally working to her advantage. 

There’s one Buzzard, grenade in hand on top of the Interceptor. The other two are taking tactical positions at the front and rear bumpers. They’re smoke Max out; it’s what Buzzards do. They lurk outside the wide and inviting opening they’ve created. They’ll shoot him before he has a chance to orient himself. 

She has to get closer, and has entirely too much distance to cover covertly and wounded like she is. Running in guns blazing to save him is clearly out of the question: Max will have to take care of himself for now. She just has to make her way further down this dried up gully. Then she can attack while smoke is thickest and the Buzzards are distracted by the raging feral on their hands.

“Come out the driver side,” she pleads with him in a whisper. More than anything it's to convince herself that’s he's really as smart as she knows he is, that he hasn't just gotten this far on luck. 

An engine roars behind her. She rolls to see the Buzzard car with the broken and bloody windscreen leaping over the hill crest. _Fuck._ She hadn't seen a passenger in that one. She mutters curses as she rolls to her back and aims her weapon with both hands. But her angle is too low. She waits, gauging how long she has before it’s on top of her, deciding whether to flatten herself or roll away. 

She hears the second car before she sees it. A little coup, smooth and silver like the moon rises behind the Buzzard. The Dag, pregnant belly and all, leans out the side and shrieks a jubilant cackle as she aims and fires a thunder-laden crossbow. A fireball silhouettes the spikey car, black against orange blaze, and then engulfs it.

"You're welcome!” shouts The Dag as she tucks herself back inside. The car returns to the road with its pale passenger shrieking giddily all the way.

Furiosa is livid. Her cover is blown, her orders disobeyed, and her plan fucked. But she is nothing if not adaptable. She drags her self to her feet, waves her metal arm, and lets out a long war cry that is neither War Boy holler nor Vuvalini ululation but a seamless combination of both. 

The Buzzard on the Interceptor turns towards her and pulls the pin from the smoke grenade with an indulgent flourish. The Buzzard hurls the smoking grenade into the car and takes patient aim at the ground below. 

Furiosa is still too far off to use her pistol accurately, and the Buzzards know it. Dag’s car is gone – like it should be, but a ride would have been nice… She examines the ground before her; the layer of dust looks too shallow and corse to hide any mines. Of course, that’s not entirely a good thing.

She takes a deep breath and tucks away her pistol. This is going to hurt. She drops to the ground and rolls lengthwise like a pipe deeper into the gully. 

Ground against her forearms, ground against her back, ground against her forearms.. Furiosa tries to gauge her progress by the number of rotations she makes. Ground against her forearms, ground against her back, ground against her forearms.. times like these she's grateful she only has feeling in one. Each rotation adds more cuts and bruises to her already battered body. 

She stops herself prone against the ground and jerks her head up to check her positioning. She squints- just another few rotations. She starts up again. She doesn’t have time for her rattled bones. She doesn’t have time for the dizziness swirling behind her ears or the nausea clawing at her throat. 

So this time when she stops, she does it suddenly. She smacks the ground so it jars her and the shock knocks her back to her senses. She rises to a crouch. Adrenaline sings through her blood as she draws her pistol and takes aim. 

The Buzzard on the roof of the Interceptor is leaning forward, weapon trained on the gaping, smoking mouth below. He never turns towards her - must think she's still too far away. He's wrong. Furiosa’s bullet slips into the exposed armpit, and the Buzzard tumbles. 

Max explodes from the interior. He’s crouching low like an animal, one hand holding a bit of cloth over his mouth and nose while the other holds his ridiculously unreliable sawed-off shotgun. Blood oozes from a gash just above his temple. He sputters, gasping for air, his eyes wild, red, and wet.

The two remaining Buzzards pounce from the sides. Max manages to get off one shot at the pelvis of one before the other lands on him, knocking him to the ground. He loses his grip on his weapon, and the two grapple for it. He's stronger than the Buzzard, but wasteland living has left him stiff. He's lucky though - his scarred fingers close around his shotgun.

The wounded Buzzard lands on his back like a toppled beetle. Bright, oxygenated blood glows brilliantly in the smoke showing the gap in the Buzzard’s armour at the leg creases. Furiosa aims for the red and fires. It won’t be a quick death, but the outcome will be the same. 

Max twists himself out of the last Buzzard's grip and thrusts the barrel of his gun into the gap in the armour at the armpit. _Click._. Max doesn’t seem to mind. He smirks and jams the butt of the gun there instead. Then he pounces spitting and snarling. He pins the Buzzard to the ground and grips with his thighs while he yanks away the helmet. He swings it once, twice into the Buzzard’s bandaged face.

“Back off! This one’s mine!” He snarls at Furiosa when she points her pistol.

She nods but doesn't lower her weapon. She scans the area - nothing, no movements, no sounds except for the low and distant rumble of her convoy racing west. It serves as a gentle background to the smacks and cracks of metal on flesh and the raw and ragged huffing and grunting of Max's efforts. 

He beats the Buzzard until there is no face left to hit, just a bloody mass of flesh, teeth, and bone fragments. Furiosa watches the familiar display in sympathetic silence. The skull cracks like Furiosa imagines an egg might. 

Max only halts his blows when his breath hitches in his heaving chest. Then he shoves the helmet into the ground and presses his weight against it. He hacks and hacks and squeezes his eyes shut. When he seems to have caught his breath he grabs the bonnet of the Interceptor and tries to haul himself to standing. His left leg won’t straighten. He gets about halfway up before he doubles over and coughs until he vomits. 

“You alright?” Furiosa asks as she hobbles towards him. 

Max grips the bonnet while he wipes his mouth. “Yeah…yeah…” he says as if trying to convince himself. He coughs again then plops himself on the bonnet and slumps over, staring vacantly at the darkening sky.


	3. Bone Grinder

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I finally got around to editing this chapter - writing new stuff is just more fun :) I've made a few changes since the Halloween draft - edited typos, added descriptions, fleshed out and clarified sparse sections.

A thick silence hangs heavily in the air. It's the sort that only happens after battle, the kind that buckles the air with excess adrenaline and the scent of death. Twitchy survivors let their buzzing, ringing ears fill the emptiness. They know that there must be something else coming; there's always something else coming.

“Something’s stuck in the brace,” Max finally says, “locked up the hinge.” He pivots and swing his bent leg onto the bonnet. He looks at the brace for a moment and then shifts his gaze towards Furiosa and watches her limp towards him. “You’re hurt.”

She knows that she must look worse then she feels, at least for the moment, but there’s no disguising that her left heel refuses to touch the ground. “Yeah,” she admits, “not bad, just annoying.” She sits beside him and sighs heavily. “We’re here now, for the night. Better make camp while there’s still some light. The others will be back for us tomorrow, tow us back with all these cars. It’s a good haul.”

She looks at him, watches him nod and then fumble with the pockets on his vest. His eyes still don’t look quite right - even more so than usual. She's not sure if his vacant stare is from the smoke or his head wound or purely exhaustion. His hands shake as he pulls out a small torch He turns on the light then scrunches his face as he recoils from it. Then he sighs and points the light at his brace. 

“Hey,” Furiosa says, holding his trembling hand still, “Let me,” and before he can argue she positions herself beside his leg. “Just try to hold the light steady, and try not to puke on me.” He snorts. She holds the brace still with her metal hand while she searches for the offending object. She finds a pebble, small and unassuming. “There it is – such a small thing to give you such trouble. Do you have tweezers?”

“Sorry.” 

She pulls a knife from the inside of her boot. “This will work.” The pebble is wedged tightly. She has to jiggle the knife to loosen it, and when it finally comes free, the knife falls as well and its blade scrapes her metal thumb. “See, I’m well suited for this.”

He tests the leg, and once he’s satisfied with the hinge’s movement he sets his leg down again. Furiosa settles herself beside him. Sitting is dangerous - she always wonders if she'll turn to dust if she stops moving for too long. Max switches off the torch and leans against her as if his body is simply too heavy. She knows the feeling well.

“You still look a bit grey. Are you good to move around?” He says nothing, wheezes, stares, and swallows. She continues, “I’ll fish out the smoke bomb; it’s mostly spent by now. I need you to get to my bike. Bring it down here if you can; if not, pull my gear bag from the right pannier. We can probably scrounge a good deal from these cars too.” He’s still silent, just the same vacant stare. “If you can’t help me, we’ll have to think of something else. I just need to know. I can tell you right now, if that bike won’t roll properly, I won’t be able to move it… that’s assuming I even make it up those hills.”

Max is puking again and coughing, puking and coughing, coughing and puking. He grips her thigh as his center squeezes itself. Then he collapses into his own emptiness, and hangs wearily from his bones.

“There’s my answer…” She squeezes his hand. “Do you have any gauze? I’d better wrap my leg before I do anything else. And the light again.” She brushes her wound with her fingers – the blood is tacky now, but it’s still oozing out. “And water. Do you have any?” He says nothing, doesn’t even move his head. “Hello…. Are you with me? I need the light again and gauze if you have it.” He does. He hands her the torch, and then it takes him a few tries, but he finds the gauze and presses it into her palm. “Look, pass out all you want after I get the car cleaned out, but right now, I need you to tell me where the water is.”

“Inside.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for it. Where abouts?”

“What?”

“The water, where is the water?”

“Inside.”

She grits her teeth in frustration. “Where inside?” He waves his right hand in a gesture she can’t quite make out. “Use your damn words, Max.” He scrunches his face. “Don’t you think I want to pass out too? But we’ve got a long, hard night ahead of us. Or, we can just take one of the working Buzzard cars, head home, and hope your car is still here whenever we make it back. So what’s it gonna be? Your choice.”

He slumps, shoulders angling in on themselves. He’s coughing again and avoiding her gaze. “Fuck,” she huffs, pity and shame tangling in her belly. “I’m sorry, she sighs. “I know it isn’t your fault you’re concussed. It’s just…” She sighs again, her bones aching. He cups his hand on her knee, and they share a long silence.

“Don’t worry about it,” she finally says. “I’ll be right back.”

### 

She finds the smoke grenade easily enough and chucks out what is left of it. The water is a different matter. His car is messier than she expected, the upholstery tattered, but soft against her skin. It occurs to her that she has never been alone in here before, and it feels strangely intimate. 

The car has been in her shop for thirty nights all together, but the only time she's been inside is when she set the killswitches. That was only for a few minutes with the shop pups milling about while they waited to get back to work. Max had even been there replacing a tyre and pretending not to notice when she snuck inside. The killswitches were supposed to protect him. 

For every one of those thirty nights shared her bed with him. She knows the sounds of his snoring, the warmth of his body, and the way his breath hitches in warning before she needs to move out of the way. 

She runs her flesh hand along the underside of the dashboard. She finds a spare pistol, his radio, a tool set, no water. She makes a mental note to radio the Citadel once they are settled. 

She then slips her hand between the seats. She tries not to think of the intimacy of the act, how the leather gives easily in some sections, but she has to coax the layers apart in others. Deep in the softest, supplest crease, she finds a slick piece of paper. She should let it be. It obviously isn’t water, not what she needs. She should leave it alone. She should, but she doesn’t. She holds it up to the light and turns it over. 

Her breath catches in her throat. Faces stare at her in the darkness – female faces with happy, smiling eyes, wild, curly hair like her mother used to have. They beam at her with pure joy. 

She shoves the picture back where she found it. But the image is fixed in her mind. Who are they? Sisters, she guesses from their ages, maybe cousins…but who are they to him? She thinks of how that picture must have sat there through the events of the day…how long? 

She feels their eyes on her while she searches the rest of the car. She dreads what else she might find, but the picture turns out to be the worst. She finds the water easily after that, in the most obvious place imaginable, tucked in a little pocket inside the driver side door – right where he _“said”_ it would be. She curses herself for not looking there sooner. Then she wouldn’t have seen his…family? She grunts as she kicks the door open. Everyone’s lost people. Then why does she feel like she's just been punched in the gut? 

She knows she should check on him, but she’s not ready to face him. She leans out the open door while she washes her leg wound and tries to not think about how she’s in _his_ seat. She hisses at the satisfying sting as the water runs through the laceration, washing away the dust and pebbles with it. She’ll take physical pain over the emotional variety any day. 

She’s wrapping the gauze when she hears a distinct moaning coming from the rear of the car. She shoves extra gauze under the sole of her boot to elevate her heel and then goes to investigate. 

She finds the Buzzard she’d shot in the hip. She’d forgotten she’d let him alive, and now he’s writhing on the ground sopping with his own blood. He’s pulled the helmet from his head and now stares up at her through his badges and implanted goggles. 

“I don’t speak Buzzard,” she says. 

“Kill me,” he sputters through the chattering teeth of one in shock. “Kill me before she do.”

“Before who does?”

“She’s come.”

She leans closer, “Look, the longer you take to tell me what I need to know, the longer you suffer.”

“Ba-Ba-Bone Grinder.”

“Bone Grinder?” She’s never heard of such a person. “Is she a Buzzard?” She doesn’t know of any female Buzzard raiders.

“Ny, nyet… Ba-b-b-Bone Grinder is Yaga. She is three… three are she.”

Furiosa frowns as she inventories the known warlords of the area. Unless Aunty has taken to night raiding, she knows of no one plausible. 

“Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba…” His voice rises from a whisper to a shout. “Ba-BA-BA-BA!”

He keeps yelling even as she rolls him to his belly, even as she straddles him and tilts his face down into the filth. She holds his head still with her thighs and draws her knife. He’s still yammering. She plunges the blade into the opening at the base of the man’s skull straight into his medulla. His body empties itself, and then he’s finally quiet. 

She rises slowly, the new silence start and heavy. Her body sags under its weight. All she hears is the subtle buzzing of her own ears still recovering from battle. No engines, no shouting, no coughing - _No coughing_. She feels that last realisation deep in her gut. No coughing – just her own breathing getting more and more ragged. 

“Max…” she says as she makes her way towards the front of the car. She should be able to see his dark shape in the last of the daylight. Shouldn’t she? The bonnet is clearly empty. Did he pass out and fall off? “Max?” She grips the metal as she bends to check beneath, nothing, just the puddles of sick and a tangle of boot prints and scuffed sand. “Max!” she shouts as she searches the ground for a trail.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Max's torch uses LEDs powered by lithium batteries. These have a shelf life of up to fifteen years. I assume they were made shortly before Melbourne fell, which occurred somewhere around eighteen years earlier. I headcanon that the Citadel and Melbourne existed at the same time, and Joe keep that a secret. Max's torch batteries are on their last legs even though he only found the torch with batteries fairly recently. 
> 
> Max has his radio from the beginning of Fury Road back. It was found in Joe's secret technology hoard. 
> 
> The photograph of two young women appears on Max's dashboard in the game, but his dead wife in that version looks nothing like Jessie in the original film. I've changed the photograph so it clearly depicts Jessie. I imagine the younger of the two women is Jessie's sister. I don't know who it was intended to be in the game.


	4. Here

Furiosa grumbles as she smears the gore from her flesh hand onto her shirt. Max couldn't have gotten far - he just couldn't have. No one else came; of that she is certain. She squats to get a closer look at the mess of prints on the ground. She studies them.

The Buzzard prints are easy to distinguish with their hulking boots. Max's feet are larger than hers but no where near as large as Buzzard boots, and he has a certain shuffle to his gate. He doesn't lift his left foot as high as the others, especially when he's tired. She notices a set with the left print smeared ever so slightly. _There!_ She sees the trail easily now that she’s honed in on it, and she's almost surprised she missed it. She follows his prints ups the slope of the gully.

“Max…” she calls again as she trudges. 

The prints meander with no clear direction other than up. Every few paces they curve from their trajectory. She flicks the light on and closes one eye whenever she’s about to lose them and turns it off again and uses the other eye once she's recovered the trail. She aims the light only at the ground and hunches to block it from view as she makes her way to higher ground.

A familiar cough sounds from up the hill, then another and the familiar growl of her bike's engine starting then dying, and then quiet. She draws her pistol and falls into the closest to a run she can muster. It’s an awkward motion, more like a gallop the way her right leg stays in front.

“Max – “ It comes out breathier than she intends, all her bundled nerves releasing at once. 

He’s on one knee in the dust and holding the handlebars of her toppled bike. “Tripped,” he mutters sheepishly as he rights himself.

Furiosa doesn’t know if she wants to hug him or hit him. Instead, she limps to meet him and her hobbled bike. “You didn’t have to.”

Max shrugs. “Just needed a rest.”

Shame is still hot in her belly – from yelling at him, from leaving him alone, from being in _his_ car, from everything. “I found your water.” She can’t say what else she found.

She trades the water for the bike and surveys the damage while he drinks. The rear tyre is fucked and the wheel bent. Aside from that, she only sees dents and scratches, minimal structural damage, nothing beyond repair. It even rolls, kind of now that Max has managed to shift it to neutral. She's lucky; she's not used to being lucky.

And her fool… “I can clean that cut for you,” she offers once he's finished sucking water into his belly. She watches his face in the shadows as he slings the canteen strap over her shoulder. “If you'll let me…” He says nothing, just belches And wipes the water from his mouth. “Car’s mostly cleared out. We should be able to stay the night there. Do you have blankets?” She has one, thin but warm.

“Yeah. And some food.”

“Good.” She pulls her lantern from the left pannier on the bike and returns his torch to him. “I'll start checking these cars for supplies, meet you by yours.” He nods, his whole body listing forward. “Hey…” she touches his arm. “Are you with me? Are you…” She can't find the right word. There are no right words, only wrong ones. “Here… are you here with me?”

He nods again. “Here.” He lifts his head and looks up at her from beneath his blood matted brow. “Just tired.”

“Then what did I just ask?”

“Blankets.”

She smiles almost imperceptibly. "We just need to get settled, and then I'll take first watch. Are you sure you…”

“Don't worry.”

How many times has she said that? She's always meant it even when she shouldn’t have. How many times has she said it to him? How many times has he disobeyed her in secret?

So she turns, and before they part ways, he says, “I’ll come back up for you, help you carry things.”

She nods over her shoulder, catches his eye in the shadows. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and have a bumper crop.”

A perfunctory search of the surviving Buzzard car indeed yields a bumper crop: extra weapons and ammo, water, bits of jerky, and that’s just the two cars Furiosa inspects. Max takes the third surviving car. Furiosa has to laugh at how he dives in through the window and wriggles his back end like a lizard held by the tail while he scrounges about. He must be feeling better – she knows she doesn’t have the energy for that much activity.

He returns with a glass bottle, a jar of dark coloured goop, and a grin. He presents the bottle first, which turns of to be half full with Buzzard vodka. He then holds up the jar so she can see its torn and faded label. 

“What is it?” Too many letters are missing for Furiosa to sound out the word.

“Vegemite,” he declares as if she's somehow supposed to know what that means. She shrugs blankly, and Max just chuckles to himself and shakes his head.

### 

“Hold still,” Furiosa chides as she dabs at Max’s forehead with a wet cloth. He winces as she crosses an especially irritated spot of skin. She scoffs teasingly; gentleness isn't exactly her strong suite, but he's being practically pampered, and he knows it. He even has a spot on an Imperator’s lap, and he might yet live to tell about it – there’s a first time for everything.

They’ve holed themselves up in the Interceptor and shut an extra pair of blankets into the driver side door and draped them over the opening to form makeshift curtains. She’s in the passenger seat; thankfully, the worst of Max’s wounds are on the right side of his head so he can be in his own seat and lie across the center. He hasn't been sick anymore, which is lucky as well.

They’ve even managed a dinner of Citadel potato crackers, jerky, and the goop from the jar. She knew the stuff as soon as she tasted it, but finding it had made Max so happy… she didn’t want to sour that by talking about her past. He knows better than to push her, so she didn’t have to lie. 

She smooths away the stubborn wisps of hair that have become trapped in a layer of sweat and grime and blood. His hair is fine between her fingers and light brown like a desert mouse. It’s not at all like the dense and wild masses from the photograph, curled and twisted like…

“Why did you stop for me?” he asks, interrupting thoughts she shouldn’t be having.

He's warm against her skin – not feverish, just comfortably warm. “Because you would have for me.” He says nothing. “Would have tried at least.”

“Yeah,” he says, eyes still closed, “would have tried.”

He’s a funny creature, this feral curled up in her lap. He turns deeper towards her thighs to hide from her lantern. “Sorry,” she mutters, and she moves it so its not shining so directly in his eyes. 

“How much do you remember, from today?”

“Enough.” His shoulders move against her body as he shrugs.

“And how much is that? Just trying to see how concussed you are.”

“Smoke… Buzzard in my hands… sick… you.”

He looks up at her as he says that last bit. She cradles his head against her and paints his wounds with turmeric paste from her gear bag. He watches her through the screen of her fingers as if he's not quite sure if she's real. Sometimes she isn't either. 

She'd wager he's not quite sure anything is real. That's why he never makes promises, never talks about anything further away then the horizon or the days he can count on his fingers. Then why does he carry the tension he does? She sees bundled in his brow, hears it in the popping of his joints when he wakes and stretches.

“I brought your bike back. I remember that.” 

“Yeah,” she whispers, “you did.” She feels a dull, empty ache in her belly as he studies her face. She decides she didn't eat enough.

“You, uh, need help with your leg?” 

She doesn’t think she would trust his trembling hands with sutures even if she thought they could get her wound clean enough to close. “It’s better left open.” He looks almost disappointed. “It could use some turmeric though.” She presses the small jar into his palm. “This stuff.”

He sits up so she can scoot lower in the seat and place her foot left on the dashboard. She holds the lantern while he sprinkles water over his fingers and then manoeuvres himself between her legs. 

His touch is gentle, like it always is against her skin. She doesn’t think she’ll ever understand how smoothly he can shift from pounding out life to coaxing it back in with the same set of hands as if simply changing gears. They fascinate her with the lines of their scars, how they quiver when he’s tired or angry or just has nothing to do with them, how the left always moves more slowly and jerkily than the right.

It’s easy to be gentle when delicate wires require delicate touches in order to be obedient. Being gentle with a lover should be just as easy, _should_ because she’s never had one, not a real one anyway, but she imagines it’s much the same thing with delicate body parts. But it’s her calf he’s touching as if he could break it or it could break him, as if he were defusing a bomb. 

Maybe that’s not so far from the truth… she did break a toe once when she kicked her wall in her sleep. She hopes she hasn’t kicked him. She thinks she hasn’t; she feels like she thrashes less when his body is familiar and warm against hers. She sleeps easier, deeper...

A thought rises in her head, a single, mad, stupid thought. She doesn’t know why she gives it voice, but she's relaxed, comfortable. Her guard is low, dangerously low. “I have a job for you, in the Citadel, if you’ll have it.”

He looks up from his work. He has to know a _job_ is different from a task. He has to know she really means a _position_. But he says nothing; he just dresses her leg in fresh gauze.

“I haven't appointed a new Prime yet, a new second in command for war and defence. I think you would be good for the job.”

He looks down, focuses on tying off the bandage, and she feels the gravity of her mistake acutely. She knows what he will say before he says it, not _no_ directly but, “No I wouldn’t.”

She tries to cover, “I mean temporarily. Our numbers are still so small…” she lets her voice trail off. Disappointment, shame, regret, whatever it is, it's ripe and hot in her belly. He shakes his head. The fact that she expected this the instant the words left her mouth doesn’t make the moment pass any more easily.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vegemite is yeast extract and salt. As long as the jar is still sealed and wasn’t contaminated before sealing, it doesn’t go bad, ever. Twinkies however only have a shelf life of 45 days, and that’s the 2015 re-release; the original version only lasted 25 days. The more you know!


	5. Undercarriage

Furiosa stares at the night through the opening she and Max have left between their make-shift curtains. She hasn't seen any light for hours, not even moon or stars through the clouds. They're warm enough for now, huddling beneath the blankets they've gathered, but the temperature will certainly drop. They'd briefly considered a fire but decided it an unnecessary risk considering that neither of them are in any condition for another fight, and neither has anything they are willing to burn.

At least they have the option to move to one of the Buzzard cars if needed, but they'll avoid that if they can help it - for his sake at least, not hers. She can't stop thinking of that photograph she wasn't supposed to see but is now etched into her brain. But she knows he's more comfortable in familiar territory. She wonders if the photograph is why... or if he even remembers it is there – it was awfully deep in its crevice. She wonders how long it survived in secret. 

Max is draped over her like a cloak, his head on his shoulder, his breathing still too harsh and heavy for him to be sleeping. He coughs every so often, but he's angled himself to minimise disturbing her. It isn't really working, but she's grateful for that; he's keeping her awake. She's surprisingly warm, comfortable even... almost safe... She could sleep like this.

"You still awake?" she asks.

"Mm-hmm." She is learning to distinguish the varieties of his particular mode of non-speech. This _Mm-hmm_ is crisp, almost eager.

"Have you ever heard of anyone called Bone Grinder?"

"Huh?"

"One of the Buzzards was rambling about her."

He shakes his head at first, moving his cheek against her skin. Then something clicks. "Um, 'ts a Buzzard tell." He chuckles to himself. "You'd like her."

"So she's just a tell, right?"

"Aren't we all?" His voice is comically ominous. 

“Pshh,” she nudges him with her elbow. 

"Mm-hmm?" He gives her a playful poke back and a look that she thinks means "Are you sure?" but it's too dark to really see him. 

“You’re just fucking with me, you cunt,” she mutters as she leans back into him. “Tell me.”

"I'm no good at tells.”

“And I’m no good at sleeping unless I have to be awake. Either tell me or go to sleep so you can relieve me later. I’m not staying up all night.”

“Fair.” He sets his chin on her shoulder gingerly, testing for her reaction before adding more weight. 

She holds back a wince and forces her self to relax. She’s sore, but she doesn’t want to scare him off. She wants to feel his deep voice vibrating in her bones. 

“Everyone has a Bogeyman; Buzzards have a Bogeywoman. She takes the dead... naughty children.”

“Hmm…” 

“Didn’t your people have one?” 

She thinks she she sees something moving in the darkness, not necessarily a person or a vehicle, just something. She braces herself for recoil in case she needs to fire. “Never had a need,” she whispers.

 _There, again!_. A black shape darts across the stars. A bird? No, a bat? Nothing of consequence – too small and too little meat to be worth the bullet. 

The car shudders.

Max shifts behind her then pops his elbow. "Storm's coming."

She does hear a vague rumbling. "I thought that was just my ears."

"Mm-mm, too uneven... too real."

She scrunches to let him maneuver around her. He's right though: she can distinguish the wild winds more clearly without his breathing behind her. The lack of him is cold against her back.

She wraps her blankets tighter and rises to meet him. The makeshift curtains flap against the chassis. She worms her was between them, letting them twist themselves about her already wrapped body. _Shhhh..._ It's a cold wind, the kind that cuts to the bone. A black mass blocks the stars to the west. 

"It's still off a ways," she says, studying the sky. "We should take one of the Buzzard cars, head north, and hide deeper in the hills."

"Nah, we're low - should pass over us. And Buzzard cars are too light - pick 'em right up." 

"We wouldn't stay in, just go find somewhere safer."

"And be stranded there?"

"It's a gamble either way," she says, and she removes the panniers from her bike. "Help me shove this underneath." 

He squats beside her, flashes his torch, and tips his head. "Think there's room for both of us?"

She eyes the undercarriage suspiciously. It's low to the ground, even lower since the crash, but is it sturdy enough? A roaring wind tells her it will have to do; they've lost their escape window. At least if the storm does pick the car up, they won't go with it. 

"Fine. Grab your water and..." Furiosa meets his gaze. "And anything else important." 

They work their way under first, cover their skin in blankets and scarves, their eyes in goggles, and then use the bike to plug the opening. She removes her prosthetic as well and loops the strap around the belly of her bike so there's no metal against her skin. The arm is lesser than the original model in comfort, strength, precision... in practically every way, but she still feels uncomfortably bare without it.

The shelter is shoddy at best, but she and Max are low to the ground in the bottom of a gully. Still, there's too much metal, and if they get buried... No, the dust is too corse and rocky here... but what about the sand the storm brings?

It's a tight fit, even more so for Max with his bulkier frame, but he slides in confidently. She imagines him here, or somewhere similar, alone with his head shielded by his arms and pressed against the ground, nothing but the car between him and the angry sky. 

It's not that she hasn't done the same, but the storms of her youth, when she was alone and without resources, were smaller, weaker, and rarer. She remembers noticing how they grew; her mothers attributed it to a _tipping point_. Everything has consequences, they used to say, and a tipping point is when those consequences become irreparable even if the consequences are still in the future. They'd been talking about the damage to the planet and the ire the Goddess felt about it, but as more time passed, Furiosa began to wonder if the same applied to people. Now she knows it does. 

She hates waiting. She hates the moments between committing to a course of action and knowing if it will succeed, the moments between action and reaction, when it's both too late and too soon to change her mind. Powerless, she counts her breath and crosses all her fingers, even the phantom ones. 

The storm comes. Savage and brutal, it howls and rants. It shakes and shoves the Interceptor's ancient frame, but as much as the car rattles, it is nothing if not resilient.

Every so often a flash of lightening momentarily illuminates the outline of Max’s face as he peers out from behind his wall of arms and blankets. He looks vaguely afraid in that lock-jawed way of all creatures for whom overt fear is too costly, like he's bracing himself for a punch. She knows she looks much the same; she knows her own fear well because so few other people do. 

And then the light is gone, and she reaches into the darkness where she once saw him. She probes, feeling for the heat radiating from his form. She finds his fingers doing the same. He squeezes. 

She breathes, her belly pressed against the ground beneath her blanket, and she feels not unlike the little grubs that survive the Dag’s snacking long enough to spin themselves into bundles. Do they twitch inside their coverings? Do they hate waiting as much as she does?

Max’s grip tightens. She hears his breath quicken in the darkness. He shifts and reaches his free hand first for a handhold somewhere on the Interceptor undercarriage, then for a handlebar, then for Furiosa herself. His fingers dig into the already tender flesh of her upper back as he pulls her to him.

“It’s ok,” she says as she turns so she can reach him with her short arm. The Interceptor’s underbelly is grazing her shoulder, and she imagines it must be pressing uncomfortably on Max, but he just pulls her tighter. “It’s ok,” she repeats.

“No.” He shakes his head as he presses it to her sternum. “Something’s got me.”

"I’ve got you,” she says, as much to herself as to him.

He jerks and slides down her body. He claws at her desperately and kicks at the storm grabbing at his feet. He grunts in frustration at the storm’s strength. His grunts turn to shouts and then screams as the force of the wind tugs him again and again. His cheek is pressed against her belly.

“Max!” She can’t possibly hold him tightly enough. Her grip breaks before his does. She grabs again, this time catching the shoulder seam of his vest. 

Lightening flashes again; the yelllow-white light illuminates Max’s panic-stricken face, and she can’t look away from it. His eyes are wild, his mouth tense and drawn against his teeth, his breathing ragged and rough. His screams and hers blend together, rising in strength and intensity as the darkness returns. Then the _something_ latches firmly to Furiosa’s ankle with all the intensity and intention of a _someone_.

Now that the storm has both of them, it overpowers them easily. It plucks the pair easily from beneath the car, tearing any flesh and fabric in its way. Of course, an easy capture is hardly worth the time it takes; so the storm juggles them until their hold on each other breaks and then casts them out like disguarded toys. 

Furiosa lands on a patch of powdery dust. Her blankets and goggles have been torn from her. She pulls herself up to her knees and elbows and frantically runs her finger over the ground as she feels for something, anything.

“Max?” she calls even though she’s certain he’s nowhere near. 

She should have thought about suction. She should have plugged all the way around the car. She should have been paying closer attention, should have noticed the storm sooner, should have kept her metal hand on and not worried so much about lightening. She should have kept water or a lantern or anything tied to her body. She should have…

If only she could see – she wants to rub her stinging eyes, but she orders herself to coax the dust from the back of her hand first. They feel marginally better, well enough even to slowly open them, but the surrounding darkness is still complete. She squirms with frustration, twitching, lashing at the nothingness around her. Tears flow, wet trails carrying the grit from her eyes in little, muddy rivers down her face. 

She doesn’t bother telling herself that her eyes are simply irritated. She just lets her despairing whimpers turn to huffs and snarls of rage. But there’s too much sand in her lungs and not enough air. She grips the ground and presses her stump to her thigh as she hacks. She feels as though she's spent half her life battling for air. 

But her lungs do clear and with them the sky. She opens her eyes to the first stubborn stars picking their way through the last remnant of dissipating storm clouds. If she were one of the Mothers, she would be thanking the Goddess; if she were a Warboy, she would be asking V8 for more. But she is none of these things; she is simply Furiosa, and so she simply finds the Southern Cross and with it, her bearings.


	6. She's Gotten by on Less

Furiosa knows the road runs east to west. She's driven through these lands a thousand times. She knows the Interceptor was facing north-northwest when it landed. She knows the storm was generally tracking east. Considering she only picked up a few more cuts and bruises, she couldn’t have traveled too far when she was blown… dragged? Tossed? She shakes her head; the words don’t matter; what does matter is that she needs to find shelter to survive the night. She is alone with no light, no water, no protection from the elements save her battle worn clothing. But she does still have her pistol and her knife in their respective boot holsters. She's gotten by on less.

She weighs her options as she feels the ground for its slope. She thinks she’s still in the gully, probably straight downwind from where she lost her grip. She could follow the gully back to the car as long as she can keep moving, maybe even find Max in the process. It can't be far, and if he's as smart as she thinks he is, as smart as she knows he is, even those he's intent on hiding it, he'll do the same. And if he's hurt? There's nothing she can do. She's useless in the dark with no supplies.

She tries not to think about him desperately clinging to her, but the memory of his pounding heart against her body, of the panic on his face in the lightening, of him slipping through her fingers makes her belly tight with worry. _Fuck!_ She chucks a stone blindly into the night. At least the anxiety is warming her while it burns through her strength.

Furiosa trudges though the dust, her body crouching low to shield herself from the wind. Sometimes she runs her hand on the gully side; sometimes she leans against it to keep her injured calf from from having to support her full weight. Sometimes when the ground becomes especially uneven, she crawls, pressing her knees into the earth and dragging her shins across its surface. 

Furiosa doesn’t know how much time she spends fumbling in the dark, but she knows the sliver of visible moon is slipping behind the hills. She’s been checking it over her shoulder as she traces the gully wall with her palm and presses her short arm against her chest. She tells herself she’s just trying to keep it warm, that the thin cloth of her shirt is insufficient. She knows this is true, but she knows that she held herself the same way when she was last injured and when she was sick after. She misses her old cincher and the way it held her when her nerves were frayed and her head was heavy and lonely and...

She shakes her head to snap herself back to clarity. _Get your scrap together_. She must have overshot the car or gone the wrong way. She should have reached it by now. She's certain of that. 

She's grown thirsty in the cold and dry air. Her fingertips have gone numb – not so numb that she cant feel the slope of the gully, but numb enough that she's starting to doubt. Maybe she’s just imagining the ripples of stones under the dust on the eroded edges. It’s not so terribly cold – not freezing or bitter, but the wind is brisk. She’s been out in it so long that the cold has seeped into her bones and is clenching the muscles of her lower back into an angry ache. She rubs her short arm against it, pressing her nub into the knotted muscles along her spine. 

She’ll just take a break she tells herself, just a few moments to rest and stretch and study the sky. She rubs her shoulder to warm her hand then slowly guides herself down. She only makes it halfway before her leg protests, and she lands harder than she intended. It just makes her dread getting up again. 

She decides that despair is a lot like an aching muscle. Sometimes it is quick and shocking, and it knocks out a person’s breath in a single blow. Other times it is insidious, and it builds itself slowly, maybe wraps around a leg and then slowly dragging its victim to their knees. 

She slumps, arms propped on top of her knees, forehead resting against the fleshy side of her elbow. Her eyes drift closed. They open, then drift closed again as she exhales. _Shhhh…_ The night is silent except for her sighs.

A light flashes and smacks her awake. Furiosa drops, pressing her belly to the ground as she fumbles for a weapon. The light has moved past her, but it’s still shining. A single headlight, she decides, and her blood hums in time with the engine as the ground shivers beneath her. It’s something large moving slowly and deliberately – slowly enough that she can follow the red glow of its taillights if she hurries. 

She scrambles up the slope and out of the gully. She knows this is risky; Mothers, she knows, but she still has her knife and her pistol, and she knows she's gotten by on less. She gallops with her gun in her hand and her heart in her cold-worn throat tangling with her ragged breaths. 

She moves as quickly as she can, but she knows she can’t possibly catch the vehicle unless it slows even more for her, and it is already barely moving at a crawl. She wonders if she’s been spotted; the vehicle isn’t sputtering at all, and she can think of no other reason for its dawdling. She knows she’s been careless. She’s about to holler, about to take her biggest gamble yet, when she spots the glittering lights of the vehicle’s destination. 

Furiosa slows to gather her wits and her breath as she approaches. There’s a tall structure before her. A single leg of dark metal wrapped with electric lights holds up a rotating orb lined with glass windows high above the hills. It turns silently with an eerily smooth motion. 

She wonders how she's never heard of such a place before. She's driven through these lands so many times. How far must this spinning building be from the road for it to stay hidden. Even Joe must not have known of it or else she would have been sent to collect tribute. A place with enough gall and resources to run external, electric lights in the middle of the night must certainly possess great wealth. 

As she gets closer she sees a pale fence encircling the building’s single legs. A lantern of orange flame sits atop the tallest posts. Skulls- she recognises the shape the firelight takes as it bursts out of the spread jaws and silhouettes the remaining teeth. The white gleam of polished bone confirms it; the entire fence is made of bones wires together, mostly long bones like femura and tibiae jutting out of the dust. Smaller bones like ribs and radii cross over and under them in a other in a carefully laid network. 

The center gate has been left open, probably since the arrival of the mystery vehicle. It stands motionless, beaconing. Furiosa hobbles through as she scans for signs of a sentry. Such a place can't possibly be unguarded. But they’re night is silent – no whirring engines, no creaking metal parts, only...

Water! And it’s even running! She hears it before she sees it glimmering beneath the orange light of the skull lanterns. She drops to the banks of a trickling stream just inside the fence. She squints at it then scoops some in her cupped hand and takes a long, slow sniff. It seems clean, clean enough at least to overwhelm her feeble resolve. She laps it up greedily even as her belly cramps from chill.

"Knew you'd find us," says a familiar voice from the shadows.

Furiosa jumps and points her pistol towards the source of the voice. “Max ?” she asks, her voice shaking as much as her hand.

"Sorry,” he says as he steps into the light. She springs at him and buries her face into his shoulder. “Sorry to startle you.” He presses his hand to the back of her head. He's solid and warm and real.

Furiosa looks up and studies Max’s face in the orange glow. She swallows. “You said _us._

He nods, and a single white headlight flicks on behind him in the dark limbo between the stream and the metal leg wrapped in light. Furiosa can see the outline of the vehicle now; it's a mixing truck, complete with wide bellied drum. The driver side door opens, and a figure in a heavy cloak steps out and then approaches. 

The woman moves with preternatural ease and confidence, appearing to almost float in her trailing cloak of slick crow feathers. She slips down her hood to reveal a lined and ancient face with a nose that's probably endured a few breaks. She smiles, and her eyes glimmer as she looks over the latest arrival to her territory.

“Bone Grinder” says Furiosa, knowing at once before whose presence she stands.

The old woman nods, and her eyes lock onto Furiosa’s. They are dark and wild, and they bore into her. “And who are you…” the old woman not so much asks as muses.

“A lost traveler,” says Furiosa when she is hit with the inexplicable sense that saying anything more would be completely unnecessary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Furoa's waist cincher/underbust corset thingy was cut off after she was back at the Citadel at the end of Fury Road. She hasn’t had time to repair it yet especially since corset boning and lacing can't be the easiest things to find in the Wasteland. The corse was originally back laced, I guess because as an Imperator Furiosa had people to dress her, but I have a hard time imagining her tolerating that. When she does get around to fixing it, she will make it have front lacing as well so she can keep the back lacing tightened and get in and out of it using the front. Yes, you can do that one handed, and yes, Furiosa being able to fight in the corset is completely plausible - I didn't believe it either until I tried.


	7. Guests

A long silence passes before anyone speaks. The woman Furiosa presumes is Bone Grinder watches her with eyes that bore. Even in the dark Furiosa can tell those eyes are sharp; she can almost feel them moving over her in the familiar manner of a hunter assessing prey or a slaver appraising trade. It's a stare that makes her bristle and twitch. If this is some kind of game of wills, Furiosa loses. “I can pay you for the water when I’ve reconnected with my people," she offers. "They _will_ come looking for me.”

“The water,” Bone Grinder echoes blankly. Her expression is almost unreadable.

“Yes… it’s potable…right?” The woman’s hesitation is making Furiosa worry. Her stomach gurgles as she looks from Bone Grinder to Max and back again as if she’s expecting him to translate for her.

“Right, potable,” Bone Grinder finally says with a slow nod. 

Furiosa swallows in relief and says, “We need shelter for the night if you can spare it. You will be compensated for that as well.”

Bone Grinder’s face lifts into a smile. Her teeth are small but white, clean, and polished. “But of course. No compensation necessary.”

Furiosa looks to Max again to gauge his reaction. Everyone wants something. Even the Mothers, who hold gift giving as such an important ritual, take into account their own needs and reasons; they want to connect, to build and maintain alliances. She’s never met anyone who truly gives anything away for nothing, no one but him.

Max is the first to follow when Bone Grinder walks towards the metal structure before them. Furiosa hesitates then follows as well. She takes advantage of her injury and lags behind so she can keep her distance. She’s fascinated by the way this Bone Grinder woman moves, how she seems to glide along on the power of the fluttering feathers on her cloak. Between that and the smooth rotation of the lit orb atop the spindly, metal leg, there is a disorienting amount of movement. And yet, everything is quiet. There’s no engine humming, no gears scraping as their teeth pass each other. 

“You coming?” Bone Grinder asks with the slightest lift of her chin over her glossy shoulder.

Furiosa meets her gaze. “Yeah, I um, hurt myself.” She watches for Bone Grinder to react; she doesn’t. “There aren’t too many stairs, are there?”

“No, no stairs.” There's a definite smile in Bone Grinder's voice, a teasing, almost playful lilt.

Max turns and extends his arm. Furiosa accepts it graciously. He is like fire against her skin. She want to disappear into that heat, let it cauterise all her raw edges, but she knows she needs to keep her guard up. 

“Are you sure about this?” she whispers as he rubs her shoulders.

Max grunts as he studies Bone Grinder from behind. “She was… eh… insistent.”

Furiosa lifts her brow. “We could ask for a lift back to the crash site."

“Know the way?” Max asks skeptically. 

She shakes her head, “Thought I did. Now…” she looks at the stars and notes how their positions have changed. “I just… How old do you think she is?”

Max shrugs. 

"As old as the Mothers, right? At least twenty-five thousand days, probably more, but she moves like she’s never been in a fight.”

“Mm-hmm.”

"It's not right.” Even Miss Giddy was hobbled and arthritic, and Giddy was locked indoors for nine thousand days.

“Almost there,” Bone Grinder shouts in encouragement.

Max nods, probably thinking of his own shuffling gate and how its distinctive sound echoes off the hills. “What’s it mean.”

“She’s hiding something; she has to be.”

He shrugs again. "Like everyone." 

They reach the base of the metal legs, and Furiosa lets Max help her onto a raised platform with a guard rail. She even adds a groan for good measure, and it does feel satisfying in a way to vocalise her pain so freely. Their host clicks her tongue once everyone is settled, and the ground begins to shift beneath the platform. Furiosa leans over the rail, and she thinks she sees the long and lean forms of snakes circling in the dust. They slip up and down and past each other in smooth, graceful silence. 

“Hang on,” says Bone Grinder with a graceful, upward movement of her hand. 

A murder of crows emerging from the front shoot of Bone Grinder’s mixing truck descend on the platform like a cloud of smoke. Their beating wings pound the air and fill it with the sounds of a rockslide hitting the ground. Furiosa dives for the platform floor, and Max does the same. He lands slightly overlapping her, his breath sharp in her ear. 

Bone Grinder cackles at her guests’ frantic attempts to cover themselves and each other. “Up, up.” She flicks her long, pale fingers towards the sky.

Each bird takes a cord firmly in its beak and beats its wings. Between the birds lifting and the snakes stirring from breath, the platform begins to lift. It jerks at first and sends Furiosa rolling into Max and the pair of them crashing against the railing. 

“I told you to hang on,” Bone Grinder teases.

"So much for hiding anything,” Max whispers to Furiosa. 

She half snorts, half grunts at him as the two drag themselves to standing.

Furiosa finds herself almost awestruck by the smoothness and uniformity of the murder’s flight. She's never been one to believe in the paranormal, but she's never been one to trust her own disbelief either; she makes a point of not letting herself be surprised. Awestruck is a risky state of being, but so is getting lost in a search for reason. Some things just are: the sun rises in the east, and this strange woman the Buzzards call Bone Grinder has a lift powered by crows.

They stop before a glass door. It slides open as if sensing their presence. Bone Grinder leads the little group into the orb they had seen from the ground. Inside is a single room filled with square objects draped with white fabric. The floor is smooth wood polished to a sheen. Candles sit haphazardly about, some set into nooks in the walls, others nestled in glass cups. The floor moves; it slides silently about a still center.

"What is this place?" Furiosa asks as she searches the room for a point on which to fix her eyes. She grips Max’s arm, not so much for show anymore but because she doesn’t like the unsteady feeling the moving floor creates in her. 

“A... restaurant,” he says slowly, turning over the long-forgotten word in his mouth.

“A what?” As soon as Furiosa is standing beside one of the pieces of absurdly clean cloth, she yanks it free and wraps it about her shoulders. She shakes with a residual shiver; coaxing the chill from her bones will take some time, and the cloth is somehow both impracticallly thin and uncomfortably stiff. Where the white cloth used to be is a table made of smoothly carved wood inexplicably without cracks or warps.

Max shrugs. “A relic, kinda like a mess hall… but posh.” She wrinkles her nose. “Shine?” he tries. 

“Here,” says Bone Grinder, gesturing at another table, this one still covered in thin, crisp cloth. 

Max reaches beneath it and scoots a chair out where she can see it. Then he finds another for himself next to the reflecting windows. He sits down and folds his arms over the table. A shine mess hall…. Furiosa shakes her head and eases herself into the chair across from his with a heavy sigh. It’s padded enough that she sinks into it, like its going to swallow her, and at the moment she sees no point in protesting.

“Thank you,” she mumbles at Bone Grinder as she watches the old woman through her drooping eyelids. 

“Loo’s in the center.” Bone Grinder slinks off in that direction without breaking her gaze.

The floor keeps moving with the tables an chairs and Max and Furiosa on it. The room is still lit, not brightly, but enough that the surrounding windows reflect their insides more than showing their outsides. 

“Hey…” Furiosa feels Max’s fingertips brush her temple. “You all right?”

“Yeah,” she replies almost automatically. But her stomach is still unsettled, not normal sick or even water sick but full of nerves that just won’t be calmed.” He's still watching her, and she can’t help thinking he can see through her. “Did you…” She looks around to make sure Bone Grinder isn’t within earshot, but Furiosa knows that with a woman who commands a murder of crows, there is no such thing as _sure._ So she whispers, “Did you drink the water?” Max nods then scoots a third chair just far enough from the table and pivots himself so he can swing his feet onto it. “And?” Furiosa asks. He shrugs in response. She sighs. “I guess it's just me then.”

“Sleep,” he says. “I’ll take the watch.”

Her mouth lifts as she folds over herself against the table. She appreciates the gesture even if it is being made more out of concern for her than out of sharing in her concerns. She trusts him, but she trusts her own instincts more- they've been with her a hell of a lot longer. She knows there’s something wrong with this place… something wrong with their host, and unti she can figure it out, sleep is out of the question.

Furiosa lifts her head. “Is she like her stories at least?”

“As much as anyone ever is.”

“You still haven't told me.”

“Mm, don’t want you biased.”

Furiosa sets her cheek against the back of her hand so she’s staring at the window. “Aren’t you suspicious? I know you don’t trust her either.” The lights inside are too bright for her to see out. Her own face looks back at her: fresh cuts and incipient bruises, tension in her brow and her jaw, weariness and red in her eyes. She closes them.

“Sure… but we’re still warm.” She can her the shrug in his voice.

“That’s something." He does have a point. They are better off then they were; they have heat and water and each other, and she still has her weapons. That’s another point…why weren’t they searched? Where is everyone else? A place like this couldn’t possibly be defended by only one person… a person who doesn’t check her guests for weapons.

“Sleep, Furiosa. I've got this.”

“Easier said then done,” she snorts. But she does let herself feel heavy, like she’s a sandbag settling. Her thoughts are tumbling away from her faster than she can follow them. She is drifting, coasting…

“Furiosa.” The voice is familiar, female, not Bone Grinder, too young… “Furiosa.” She opens her eyes and lifts her head. She starts to look behind her, but then the voice speaks again, “Fury,” certainly originating… but there’s nothing there but glass and beyond the glass, the night.

A child with raven black hair spilling over her shoulders and tawny, desert-warmed skin stands behind their table in its reflection. Her eyes are dark but glistening, rimmed in red like she’s been crying. “What happened to you, Fury? Why did you leave us?”

"I... I didn't,” Furiosa stammers. She tries again to look over her opposite shoulder and towards the center of the spinning room, but something draws her attention back. She looks to Max as her head turns, but he doesn’t seem to have noticed anything. “Look,” she mouths at him.

“What happened to you, Fury? What happened to my friend?”

“I came back, Val” Furiosa whispers as she presses her hand against the window. “I was taken, but I came back.”

“No!” The glass shakes as the apparition screams. Then she speaks quietly, her voice cold and slick. “You are not my friend. My friend did not come back.”


	8. Nothing Unusual

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brief but intense gore starts in this chapter, also panic attacks, breakdowns, and other canon-typical mental health stuff.

Furiosa jerks her head away. She scans the room over her left shoulder and sees Bone Grinder staring intently forward, eyes narrowed but unfocused as if lost in an angering memory. Its not unlike the look Miss Giddy would get when she’d just read something especially compelling and needed time to digest it. 

Beore Furiosa can get Bone Grinder's attention, the Valkyrie child slips her hand under Furiosa’s chin and coaxes it forward. She ages before Furiosa’s eyes. Her cheekbones emerge from the childish fullness of her face, and her chest swells with young, proud breasts. She smiles with all the brightness and hope of youth. She tuck her hair behind her ears and leans in, her lips pursed and pink.

"Am I still not pretty enough for you, Furiosa?" she asks, and then she traces Furiosa’s bottom lip with her finger. “Are you going to reject me again?” There’s no malice in her voice, just hurt and truth. “We could have been so happy.” She pulls Furiosa towards her, presses her chest and her pelvis against Furiosa’s body. “We still can," she says in a breathy whisper that stirs an ache deep in Furiosa's being.

Val was never this forward. Val was careful and kind and even nervous about such things and… ‘You’re not real,” says Furiosa at first to convince herself but then her voice dropping angrily. She turns, pulling both her body and her attention away from Valkyrie’s touch, and grabs Max’s hand. “We have to leave.”

His confusion shows on his face, and his eyes dart. He's gone all twitchy again though he tries to cover it. He squeezes Furiosa's hand while he centers himself. "What's wrong?" he asks.

“Do you prefer the company of men now, Furiosa?” Valkyrie demands. She sounds hurt, not a playfully teasing hurt but one that is sharp and scornful. “Is he the one you think of when you touch yourself?" She chuckles at the obviousness of the answer. "You _want_ him.” You want him to touch you with his man parts and his man mouth. That’s why you slowed down to save him. You ache with the lack of him.”

“You’re not real.”

“And whose fault is that?” The glass shakes again. “You slowed down to save him, but you left me to die. You didn’t even notice.” Valkyrie’s face distorts and swells first red then purple. A gash on the top of her head opens to reveal first her pale and polished skull and then the grey matter of her brain. It splits and spills. Her eyes bulge. “I was the last Swaddle Dog. Now we are no more because you chose the schlanger with a pretty mouth.”

Furiosa stands up violently, knocking away her chair. The Valkyrie ghost purses her lips and clicks her tongue as she leans out of the window glass. She slips her hand under Furiosa’s chin again. This time she tilts her head up so Furiosa is looking down, her long neck exposed.

“You have to wonder, are those lips as soft as they look?" she huffs. "What about his skin… is it soft where the sand never touches?” She tips Furiosa’s chin down again so they are looking each other in the eyes. “Do you think you'll moan like a feral yourself when he puts that cock between your legs?”

Furiosa swats Valkyrie’s hand away. She tugs the tablecloth she’s wearing high on her neck and folds her arms over it. "Let me rephrase, _I_ am leaving. _You_ can do whatever the fuck you want,” snaps Furiosa to Max as she kicks a chair out of her way. It clatters to the ground, and she storms away from the table. 

"Where to?" Max asks, his tone soft as he rises to follow her.

All she knows is she has to get away, to go somewhere, anywhere without Bone Grinder or ghost Valkyrie or the stupid fucking spinning floor. Furiosa scans the room for an exit; they can’t get out the way they came in- that's certain. But Bone Grinder has disappeared, and when Furiosa looks again at the window, the Valkyrie ghost is gone. In her place Furiosa just finds her own reflection looking as old and worn as ever.

"What is it?” Max is watching her, which he tends to do in quiet moments, but this is different. His concern is palpable, and she hates it, hates knowing her weaknesses are so bare and obvious.

She knows she has to say something, but as tense as the silence between them is, she can't seem to find the will to break it. _Fuck!_ he never had any trouble leaving before, but here when it's what she wants... “I, uh… I keep seeing things,” Furiosa finally admits. “Things that aren’t really there.”

"Then, if they aren’t real… why…” he makes a rolling gesture with his hand as is trying to coax the words from his gut, “Why do you think you can leave them?"

She sighs. He has that way of asking questions that turns the subtle into the obvious. “I have to try. I have to do something.” She could try to make herself throw up the stream water, and if she knew that would keep the Valkyrie ghost away it would be more than worth the loss of hydration. But she knows that if the water is tainted, it’s already in her bloodstream. 

No. She can think of nothing worse than sitting here all helpless with her eyes squeezed shut while she waits to feel normal and fears that _this_ is now normal. No, she needs to get away, no more Bone Grinder, no more ghost Val, no more weird spinning room restaurant-thing. Anything has to be better than this.

“Leaving… it won’t help,” Max says as if his meaning weren’t clear enough before.

Fuck everything!” she growls as she storms to the center of the room where the floor is still. The step from the moving section to the still one is disconcerting in and of itself, as though the steady rotation he somehow become ordinary. 

Max catches up to her while she finds her bearings. “What do you see?” he asks.

“It’s gone,” she says, “for the moment.” What she wouldn’t give to keep it away…. “Are you sure you aren’t seeing anything unusual?” She follows him behind a desk and into a vestibule. 

“Nothing unusual.” He's already searching the area, peering behind weak, loosely hung doors. “Can you…” he gestures, “stairs?”

“I’ll mange. I thought you said leaving wouldn’t help.”

He holds open a door on each side of the vestibule. Behind each is a stairwell leading downward. “But it’s what you want. Split up and recon?”

“I’ll take this one,” says Furiosa, and she cuts to the right before she has a chance to doubt herself. 

Max lets the door swing shut behind her. The sound of the doorsweep brushing the tile floor echoes off the walls, and then there is quiet around her. She stands before a bare but lit stairwell. 

Going down the stairs is easy enough if not exactly pain free. There are rails on the sides and a landing in the middle, and she's used to running off of gritted teeth and aching muscles. Even though her good leg burns from the extra effort of compensating for her bad one, she knows this is better than sitting and waiting. She lets her face twist with every wince. The pain is grounding; it’s real. 

The stairs end at the mouth of another corridor, this one lined with cubes of polished metal. A wall stands behind one row of cubes, and behind the other is a network of countertops, then another corridor of cubes, and then finally, a wall. The whole space hums with what Furiosa guesses is a generator running behind the back wall.

Furiosa rubs her calves and then presses forward. From a rack of pots and pans hanging from hooks on the side wall, she decides the place is or at least was a kitchen even though she doesn’t recognise most of the equipment. She hurries through the passageway while consciously avoiding looking into her reflection on all the polished steel surfaces. That is easy and natural enough once she finds her rhythm. She’s only checking for the number of reflected figures and ignoring any of their details. 

The wealth of salvage around her poses its own set of problems. Her gaze drifts over a menagerie of useful objects, like that block of knives over there… blades in every conceivable shape and size! Her thieving days are behind her, but any trade negotiations would require more contact with Bone Grinder. She could send Max – no one survives completely without trade…. She catches a glimpse of herself in the gleaming steal of a butcher’s blade… No, keep moving. She straightens her back and wipes her brow. There may be time later – not now.

The whistle of a teapot interrupts her thoughts. She stops before turning the corner at the back of the corridor. She draws her pistol from her gaiter and holds it ready as she follows the familiar sound and the warmth of a kitchen in use. Bone Grinder bends over a tea kettle and hums as she works.

"Don't be rude dearie,” Bone Grinder chides her without looking up. "C'mon out."

Furiosa holds her ground. She aims her weapon and asks, “What do you want?” without her gaze ever leaving her sights. 

"Is that any way to talk to your host?” Bone Grinder shakes her head and then says as she pours two cups of tea, “But old soldiers aren’t exactly known for their manners.” She holds up one of the cups. “I would like you to have some tea.”

Furiosa scoffs. “I’m not letting you put anything else inside me.”

Bone Grinder wrinkles her nose, "Then how will I read your tea leaves?”

“You won’t.” 

“Well,” huffs Bone Grinder, “your loss.”

Furiosa still hasn't lowered her pistol, which Bone Grinder doesn’t seem to mind. “What do you really want? That tea is a means to an end.” 

“To get to know my guests - I get so few these days. And then the guests I do get decide to point weapons at me.”

“You seem rather accustomed to that.”

“I believe you are misreading me.” Bone Grinder walks towards Furiosa with a teacup extended. “Let’s just talk. I won't even make you put down your weapon.”

“You won’t, huh…”

“Oh Furiosa, I know you don’t like to be underestimated; please show me the respect you would like for yourself. Just, come out of the shadows.” Furiosa shifts forward and lowers her weapon. “That’s better, now set it down so you can have some tea with me.” 

Furiosa runs her fingers over her pistol grip. She watches the woman with narrowed eyes. 

“I don't want to hurt you, Furiosa. I wish you would believe me.”

Furiosa sighs and reluctantly puts her pistol away. She still doesn't believe Bone Grinder, but she knows she's not getting any information out of her is she doesn't at least pretend. “I, uh,” she stumbles over her words as she tries to decide how much to say, “I think your water made me sick.”

“I don't think so.” She presses the teacup into Furiosa’s hand. “I think you're just tired and dehydrated; those two little things can go a long way towards making a person feel like rubbish. If anything you should have more."

Furiosa nods. “Who are you?”

“The infamous Bone Grinder, like you said.” She sips her own tea. “You have some salvage for me?” She gestures at the dried blood on Furiosa’s lap. 

“What do you mean?”

“Not that what you brought with you isn't perfectly adequate, but… it seems you've left quite the wake behind you.” She sips again. “The naughty and the dead, they belong to me. Someone has to keep this territory clean.

"We were attacked," says Furiosa defensively.

Bone Grinder smiles showing her rows of small, gleaming teeth. "And to the victor go the spoils... Lucky you."

"Seems you aren't quite the kindly old granny-type you pretend to be."

Bone Grinder shrugs. " Kind, old... it's all relative."


	9. Black Annes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ample amounts of gore and canon-typical mental health stuff follows.

Furiosa sighs and swirls her tea. It looks innocent enough -- not that she’s planning on drinking any of it, but she may have to in order to avoid having to fight her way out of this mess. The tea is thin, and it smells slightly green and bitter. It reminds her of the concoctions the Mothers and the Sisters poured down her throat when she was sick, and she had somehow convinced herself that all her coughing was just her body reacting to goodness after so much evil had burrowed its way between her bones. When she had finally managed to cough out the incoherent babble that had passed for logic in her febrile mind, Capable assured her that her body was purging itself and that when the illness was over, only the good would remain. At the time, Furiosa believed her; now, she knows the truth, that like Kore having eaten the fruit of death, she has been forever changed. 

And here’s Bone Grinder echoing that painful truth: Furiosa has indeed left quite the wake behind her. The blood on her lap has dried to a stiff crust, and on its rusty surface it looks much the same as the rest of the blood on her clothing, but it is not the same. She had done what the man wanted even though he was no longer a threat. He’d begged her. He would have just suffered otherwise. Mercy killing… execution… it's all relative.

“We were attacked,” she says again, putting up the words like a shield against Bone Grinder’s stare. 

“There’s no need to be defensive.” Bone Grinder’s tone is calm, almost warm. “You are what you are.” 

Bone Grinder crosses a bank of polished cabinets above the stove as she makes a wide semi-circle. The black feathers of her cloak flutter behind her, their black images curling up like smoke on the shining steel. Then, when she’s reached Furiosa’s shoulder, Bone Grinder turns and lets her hood fall. Her reflection stands as proudly, as radiant and golden as the sun. 

Furiosa snarls as she hurls the teacup. Its ancient ceramic shatters on contact with the offending cabinet. Tea drizzles down Angharad’s face like tears.

“You’re better than this,” chides Angharad from behind crossed arms and a network of tea splatter and ceramic chips. Her eyes glimmer in that way they always did, like she knows a secret, like she knows she will win in the end.

Furiosa says nothing. She closes her eyes and turns to face Bone Grinder before opening them again. Then she grabs the old woman by the throat, her fingers tangling in white hair and tripping over lose skin. “Explain this!” she hisses.

Bone Grinder calmly plucks open Furiosa’s hand one finger at a time. Once she's freed her larynx, she mutters, “For fucksake, what kind of savage are you? Haven’t you ever seen your own reflection before? Like I said, you are what you are.”

“Don’t –“

“Don’t what?” asks Angharad. Her voice is small ad soft at first, but it grows as she speaks. “Don’t be stupid? Don’t push if you can’t take a push back? Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to?” She narrows her eyes so the white scars around them bunch together. “Don’t damage _his_ property?” She swings her arms open exasperatedly, rattling the entire row of cabinets. “Don’t be ungrateful?”

Bone Grinder flashes her small, white teeth. “Is something the matter?” She ask, her voice soft and tentative wth concern. “Don’t like what you see?” She hums in sympathy. “I know the feeling.”

“Is something the matter with you,” asks Angharad, “that you could stand by while he raped us? That you could bring us to that place even though you knew what would happen to us?”

“I… I didn’t…”

“If you think for a second that taking us out to the desert to die could make up for… for that!” The ghost is so angry as to be apoplectic, her rage moving out from her form in shockwaves. They shake the pots and pans hanging from the walls. “What did you pay for us? What did we cost?” Her voice quiets, and the room falls still. “It doesn't matter if you took me specifically; you took enough of us, and we’re all the same to you.” She scowls at Furiosa’s shaking head and asks, “What's my name? Do you even know it now?” 

“Spl - Furiosa studders, “ Angharad.”

“Took you long enough.”

As the Angharad ghost speaks, tyre tracks form on her great, round belly, splitting it open and grinding sand and rubber into the wound. And there, between the layers of mangled skin, yellow fat, and spilt organs is her baby. Tiny fingers move in the gap. The seams between the cabinets do nothing to block the gore. The room smells of death.

Furiosa’s stomach heaves, driving bile into her throat. She retches, and whatever is left of the stream water pours to the floor. Her legs give out beneath her, and she follows the water; a well-deserved pain shoots through her legs when her knees hit the floor. She heaves again, this time expelling only her own emptiness as she collapses into herself.

“What’s wrong Furiosa, gone soft all of a sudden?” taunts the ghost Angharad.

Furiosa squeezes her eyes shut as they water. “Not real, not real, not real…” She balls herself up and presses her arms to the sides of her head.

“I never thought you would break so easily. You were always so careful about hiding from us...” 

Furiosa sniffles and sucks air through her sour mouth. The Angharad ghost is still prattling on, taunting her and laughing at her misery. It's all true... all true but nothing new, just the same old shit Furiosa has been carrying for days, and although it's heavy, although she's not used to it being thrust in her face, it's far from unfamiliar. It's far from insurmountable.

So, Furiosa presses the toes of her boots into the ground as she gropes the top of her gaiter for a weapon. Her movements are subtle, hidden behind her quivering. Then she lunges at Bone Grinder. She snarls as she slashes with her blade. Her attack is ragged and desperate without her usual precision. Bone Grinder slips out of range almost quickly enough, the blade catching her clothing and just enough flesh for blood to show on the sharpened steel.

“Enough,” Furiosa grunts as she lunges again. This time her blade finds a home beneath Bone Grinder’s sternum. It slides in, parting her flesh as it goes. Blood surrounds it and wanders lazily away from the hilt in bright, red rivulets. 

“Ah, that's a girl.” Bone Grinder smiles, blood showing in the corners of her mouth. “But, sorry honey, that won’t do.”

Furiosa jolts back in shock then grumbles in frustration as she shakes her knife as if it were a stuck gearshift. She finally rips it out and shoves Bone Grinder back, sending her stumbling into another steel cube. 

I’ve already tried that, more than a few times actually,” Bone Grinder chuckles as she stands. “But if you are truly as ruthless as they say…” 

Furiosa narrows her eyes. “What do you mean?” 

“Chin up, dearie. Not all of us get to be legends in our own time, but you and I, we’re _come back_.” Bone Grinder resumes her position over Furiosa’s shoulder. “ _Immortan_ , right? That’s what your people call it?” 

“Not _my_ people,” Furiosa spits as she shoves Bone Grinder again. 

She flees the way that she came: past the teapot on the stove and up the long corridor the stretches before her. She still can't quite run, but her hobble is swifter than the word implies. She braces herself against the cabinets and other cube-shaped equipment clad in polished steel as she goes. Her dirty fingers leave a trail of streaky prints; from each springs another ghastly reflection of Angharad in her mangled demise. She shifts to the other side of the passage, but even though she now touches the metal with her stump, the effect is the same.

The chorus of Angharad ghosts explain, “Toast told us stories, how she and the other children in her band would huddle by the weak campfire and whisper. The campfire had to be small, barely enough to keep warm or else the Bag of Nails would see it and come looking for children. Of course, you had other names…” she leans out of the cabinets. “You heard us talking, didn’t you? Even then you were lurking… when you should have been protecting us, not hunting us. You were supposed to protect us.”

Furiosa skids to a halt before a full-length pantry. She should have noticed it before, she have marked it in her mental map of this place, but she'd been destracted by the menagerie of knives. Now Angharad's mangled body looms before her with every horrid detail of he wretched story visible on its form.

“Why did he save you and not me?” ghost Angharad demands, thrusting forward the gore of her body in all its brutality. “If he knew what you were, he never would have saved you.”

Furiosa’s recoils even though the sight is nothing new to her eyes, and her stomach heaves even though it is long empty. And yet, the sight is dizzying effective. She finds herself swaying sideways into Max’s waiting arm. She curses herself for not hearing his approach. She’d thought his presence was still Bone Grinder’s. She doesn’t know how much of this he sees or hears or how many of her words she has actually spoken, but she is so overwhelmingly glad to have him there beside her. 

Her face contorts as she snarls at the apparition who isn’t Angharad, “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

"Because you never told him who you are," says Angharard." He doesn’t know that everything that was done to him you have done to countless others. He doesn’t know that it is only by shear luck that he was someone else’s victim instead of yours. And you’ll never tell him, just like how you’ll never tell him that you looked where you shouldn’t have looked.”

“You mean like you are now?” Furiosa demands of Bone Grinder who is now approaching them from behind.

Both she and Max go for the collection of knives stick on the block at the counter. Furiosa takes a long, thin blade with serrations at the edges and charges Bone Grinder, lifting and ramming her into the wall where the post and pans are hanging. Her blade finds a home in the woman's armpit, pinning the cloth and feathers of her cloak to the wall. Max follows with another long blade and pins the other shoulder. Then they return with more blades. Furiosa goes for one of Bone Grinder's dangling feet, but Bone Grinder lifts it and wraps her leg around Furiosa's waist. 

Bone Grinder draws Furiosa close, straining the two blades holding her to the wall as she coos then tilts her head like she’s thinking and then clicks her tongue, “ I never would have recognised you without all your trappings." She doesnt even flinch when Max plunges a blade into first her free foot and then one of her hands. She simply continues, "Otherwise…” as she lifts her other hand at her elbow so its shadow falls on Furiosa’s face. “I only see what you show me, and you've finally showed me who you are.” Then she and the ghost Angharad laugh in unison. “We are very much alike, you and I – dealers of death, claimers of flesh. At least I know myself and my place in the world.”

Furiosa stabs her throat with a long-pronged fork until she feels her weapon meet the wall behind its target. She wriggles the fork to make sure it will stay as she relishes in the silence. Then she fills it with her own roar as she braces her short arm against Bone Grinder's remaining hand so Max can bind it to the wall as well. Then she twists her way out from Bone Grinder's still stubborn grip and stumbles to freedom as she catches her breath.

"Oh, Furiosa," mutters the still-present Angharad ghost.

"Let's go," Max insists.

Furiosa nods, her heart still pounding, her chest still heaving, her blood still singing with adrenaline.

"Again, again," Angharad chuckles, "Again, the fool saves you. He wouldn't keep doing this if he really knew you. You're just a waste of all his kindness. I, however," her voice cracks, "I could have done so much." She balls her hands into fits and pounds the pantry door. "I could have changed the world. I could have fixed things." Her voice them becomes quiet and bitterly cold but still harshly insistent. You, Furiosa, you killed the world just like you killed me. You were supposed to protect me, and you let me die. He wouldn't have saved you if he knew what you've done and who you were... who you still are." She shakes her head. "An entire generation made blood bags, battle fodder, and walking wombs... You killed the world, Furiosa; you killed our future."

Furiosa shoves at the pantry door. It gives but doesn’t break, much to her dismay. Instead she’s the one who crumples, her shoulder girdle collapsing in on her chest as a single, huffing sob empties her of air. She feels a hand warm and steady on the roundest part of her back. She wants to fall into it; she knows it isn’t strong enough to hold all of her, but that’s fine because she wants to fall.

“Hey... Not real, none of it’s real,” Max whispers as he slips his arm around her back and leads her away. "Let's go. Away, far away."

He pulls her into him when they reach the staircase and start the ascent. She lets him take her weight but not keep it. Instead of leaning into him while she struggles up the stairs she collapses onto the first step and rest her forehead on the crook of her arm. She won't move, won't look at him.

Max's arm is still around her, still clinging to the person he thinks she is, still insisting, "You're ok. It's not real."

She shakes her head. “No – it is, it is.” Fucker practically bleeds empathy, but he shouldn’t; he’s always been wrong because she isn’t worth it, and he just sits there with his eyes all soft and pained for her as if she were anything close to innocent or even deserving. “It may not be real, but it’s true.” 

She leans away from his touch. She needs to be distant so she can speak without any of her stupid emotions fucking her up. “There is a tell popular in the Bullet Farm suburbs. They call their Bogeywoman Black Annes.” She forces her voice to be steady, but she doesn’t look up. She can’t; it’s better if the words belong to someone else. “She has a grey face, so grey it’s almost black… and an iron claw. She… she steals children – drags them into her cave bower for their blood, for their flesh…. She wears her conquests hanging from her hips; they never weigh her down.”

“But she’s just a tell.”

Furiosa shakes her head until it throbs. “Real!” she spits, and then the sobs take her. They rack her body, and she curls even more deeply into herself as she digs her nails into her own flesh. “If you listen on a quiet night, you can hear her coming… Hear the drumming of her retinue, the jingling of her chains.”

His hand is still steady on her back. “Not anymore.”

This only makes her cry harder. She wants to snarl and thrash, but her body won't cooperate. She wants to shove him away and scream that he doesn’t know anything, that he’s a fool for even trying and that the smartest thing he ever did was leave.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you're wondering, Black Annes is a Bogeywoman figure from the British Isles. Her description in her native folklore is very close to what I've listed here - the only differences being that she has iron claw _s_ and that her belt is made of her victims' skins.


	10. Headmates

“Let’s go,” Furiosa says, more to herself than to Max. They don’t have time for this, no time for any of this. Bone Grinder will work herself free. Any ordinary person would be bleeding out but not her. “She’ll be after us.”

Max’s hand is on her shoulder, warm against her exposed skin. The white cloth she'd wrapped around her shoulders is gone. She hadn't noticed dropping it at the time. Regardless, it's gone now.

“Wait,” he says, not like a command or even a request; it’s more like a place holder. “Recognised you… when I first saw you. Knew you would be trouble.”

“Trouble,” she snorts, “that’s one way to put it.”

“Knew all the stories – Black Annes, Bag of Nails….”

She shifts under his hand. “Do you believe them?”

He shrugs. “Bout half.” 

"You don't have to tell me which half,” she mutters as she grips the railing and hoists herself to standing. His hand is still on her, along with his eyes, and he's doing that thing again where he's somehow both lost on his way to Valhalla and painfully, confusingly present. She doesn't think she'll ever get used to the intimacy of that gaze and how it makes her feel both vulnerable and powerful at the same time. She wishes she had killswitches of her own. 

“The half where you did what you had to. You… uh… you wouldn't see _them_ otherwise.” Furiosa says nothing, just hobbles up the stairs. Max holds his hand still so it traces a bumpy line down her back as she rises. “They aren't real,” he says as if she doesn't already know. “They’re just you.” 

Climbing up the stairs is more difficult than climbing down them; always has been and always will be. Her good leg and her full arm burn with the effort, but she can bury herself in the burn. If she keeps a steady pace she can hide from the arm that still hovers behind her at the edge of her senses and avoid adding her weight to the braced leg she hears scraping up the stairs behind her. She’s grown accustomed to Max at her back. She knows his presence, knows it's reliable while it lasts, and knows that it won't last. Nothing lasts.

“Sometimes they lie.” His voice is soft and ragged. “Sometimes not. Sometimes they’ve got the good ideas.”

She scrunches her face “But you said you didn’t…”

“Said, ‘nothing unusual.’ Sometimes they’re quiet. Sometimes they hide, but always there.”

Furiosa studies the stair ahead. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. Got headmates. Never alone.”

But that's not what she means. She's sorry she's making such a big deal of living one night in his everyday existence. Of course she's seen him twitchy and wild-eyed. She’s seen him swing at shadows, and she's even heard him chuckling almost fondly at silent jokes. She’s always thought better of asking; everyone’s got their shit. She’s just never known what exactly his shit entails, and she still doesn’t. It's his; she has no right to it. 

She’d thought she had a handle on her dead. She’s drawn them on her walls so she can look to them and know that they want her to keep going. She’s never cheated death; it’s always taken someone else in her place, sometimes many someones. She likes to pretend that they knew what they were doing, that they chose to save her, and that if she can be worthy of that sacrifice she can give their deaths meaning. She just keeps failing them though, keeps breaking every promise she makes to do better. 

The top of the stairs comes not a moment too soon. Furiosa’s good leg is cramping angrily. She grits her teeth as she looks for a place to sit. The tables are too far away; the door to the stairwell is too unsteady, and even the walls... Max takes her weight from her without being asked. He holds her up by her armpits so she can hook her short arm around his neck and pull the foot of her good leg with other. Relief washes over her as the cramp fades.

He keeps holding her even after she’s finished and she can stand on her own power. His arms wrap around her, pressing her into him. He's so solid and real, and she’s so fucking tempted to just let herself dissolve into the warmth of his body and the rhythm of his pulse.

“You’re too good to me,” she murmurs, willing herself to step away. 

He draws her head to his so the skin of their foreheads touch. “Impossible.”

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” she says, half-forcing a smile. “Just need to figure out how.”

“Why don’t you ask _them_?”

"Don't think they're in a mood to be helpful.”

“Don’t got moods; they’re just you. You're in charge.”

“Then tell me the story of the Buzzards’ Bone Grinder, even the parts that probably aren’t true. We need to know everything.”

So as Furiosa and Max walk back across the room with the rotating floor to the table where they were first sitting, the tell unfolds. Max stumbles over some of the words, and she has to suss out his meaning, and the tell moves like the spinning room, curling back around itself. But between the pair of them, they gradually untangle the story.

She’s called Bone Grinder because that’s what she does: she turns the bones of the dead to dust clouds. That is of course, after her crows eat their flesh. Her spinning house sits by the mouth of one of the rivers of the underworld, which must be why drinking it causes visions of the dead. She has another name, Baba Yaga, and probably many more. She is Baba because she is old, but no one knows why she is Yaga. There was a time, however, when she was neither.

The Buzzards' underworld is always green and full of rivers. They believe that all the plants of the world belong to the dead. The Green Walker, prince of the underworld, came one spring, sprouting life and green from his steps. He met a young woman named Marzanna, and they fell in love. For a time they were very happy, but the Green Walker had to move on, to spread green all over the world. Marzanna stayed behind in the spinning house they had built together and from that high vantage she watched the world bloom with life while she grew lonely. 

The Green Walker took lovers wherever he went as was in his nature, and Marzanna’s loneliness sprouted jealousy and rage. When Green Walker returned, they battled. No one knows exactly what happened; some say that she slew him, others that he slew himself in shame, but at whosever hand, he died and returned to the underworld taking all of his green with him.

Marzanna’s bitterness, anger, and guilt consumed her and preserved her until she became Baba Yaga. She sends the dead where she can not go, and she claims the naughty and makes them into her crows for they alone are her kin in all the world. Marzanna is stranded here in the house she once shared with her lover, forever between life and death, and the earth will never agin blossom with spring, so goes the Buzzard tell.

“Marzanna killed the world,” says Furiosa staring into her own reflection in the glass of the window. 

“That part’s not true, can’t be,” Max assures her as he positions himself behind her.

“Doesn’t matter. She thinks she did; that’s what’s important.” Furiosa doesn’t take her eyes off of her own face. She looks a fucking mess, her every pain and worry written on her face. She knows Bone Grinder will come and loom over them like a vulture. The dead river waters that flow through her veins will call up her dead and all her worst fears about them for her to see reflected in Bone Grinder. Now that she knows how it all works, she just needs to take control of the conversation. “But what does she want?”

“You could ask her.”

“I already did. ‘To get to know my guests,’ that’s what Bone Grinder said. I just don’t know what she meant.”

Max shrugs. “Wants to know if you’re naughty, if you’re like her.”

“To turn me into a crow?” Even given everything that’s happened so far, that still sounds ridiculous. 

“She’s lonely. No headmates of her own, so she borrows yours.”

“Fucking rust bucket can keep ‘em,” Furiosa scoffs, but she knows Max is right, maybe not exactly, but the closest either of them have been so far. She thinks of the pained satisfaction she saw in Bone Grinder’s face, a look she tried to cover. 

“Don’t like what you see?” Bone Grinder had asked and then commiserated, “I know the feeling.” Those were the truest words spoken all night. She has her shit like everyone else. She has to connect through pain because pain is all she knows. 

Of course as profound as these realisations are, they’re useless. What Furiosa needs is a way out. But if she gives Bone Grinder what she wants, maybe she can negotiate a trade. 

“I need you to go free her,” she says to Max. His reflection shows his confusion. “I need her here.” She’s still alive. She’s immortan; that part of the story at least is true.” She smirks. “No, I haven’t completely lost it. You saw the thrust I gave her, right in the solar plexus. She said she’s tried it before. She can’t die. That’s how I know she’s really immortan – because a real immortan would want nothing more than death.” 

“So kill her?”

“If we can.”

“Awful, being stranded like that. Wonder if she remembers.”

“Being Marzana, you mean?”

He fiddles with a tear in his shirt. “Anything but this.”

"We'll have to ask," says Furiosa, steeling herself. “We can be her headmates.”

Max seems to like this plan. “You right by yourself?”

Furiosa nods. “I only see things when she’s here. She brings them out of me. I think you’re right; she likes watching me suffer, like she feeds off of it or something.”

"Like a vampire.”

“A what?”

“Another tell. They feed off blood though.”

Furiosa swallows lump forming in her throat and she watches her face and imagines his blood moving under her skin. She remembers the questions the Angharad ghost had demanded of her, and she knows that controlling a conversation with Bone Grinder and her own ghosts is easier said than done. She has to handle her own shit first. She has to be sure. 

“What you said in the stairs… You mean that you knew the entire time, even when… you knew whom you were saving?”

“You, saving you.” He brushes her shoulder one last time then shuffles off - the obstinate cunt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Marzanna and Green walker is based off of the Slavic myth of Marzanna and Jarilo (names have many variations across Eastern Europe).  Link Baba Yaga does not traditionally have an origin story, but as a crone, she and Marzanna after Jarilo's death share an acheatype.


	11. Words

Bone Grinder floats across the room, her black cloak now in shreds. The fabric extends behind her like wispy tails of smoke. Her last encounter with the road warriors is written in her mangled feathers and tattered flesh. None of her wounds are now or look like they ever have bled more than a trickle, but the relative lack of blood reveals the damage in brutal detail. 

“Come,” commands Furiosa. She folds her arms on the table and adopts the confident slouch of one whose authority does not require perfect posture. “Let’s talk.”

Bone Grinder holds a hand over her throat and hisses, “Let’s.” She slips into a chair without pulling it out, and Max, who has been following her like a shadow, moves behind Furiosa. “Your pet here…”

“Partner,” Furiosa corrects her. 

“Partner,” she acquiesces. “Your partner has nothing but good things to say about you.”

“I can imagine,” though she'd rather not. She wishes she had her metal hand so she could drum the fingers against the table. She's always found the sound to be quite effective. “I just want to make sure you don’t plan on keeping us here past the morning.”

“Of course not,” Bone Grinder rasps. “I’m a bit of a night owl myself so I’ll be going to bed. You can leave whenever you’d like.”

“How about now?” Furiosa leans back in the chair and stretches herself so she can feel Max’s hand at her back.

“I thought you neeeded shelter for the night.”

“Cut the shit. What will it take for us to be able to leave?”

Bone Grinder does the same. “I’m not holding you here.”

“Then how do we get out?” 

“The same way you got in, of course.”

“The crows?”

Bone Grinder nods. “It’s the only way. The original lift broke down ages ago, and the fire exit caved in.”

“And the crows only listen to you?” Furiosa turns to look at the window and the three of them reflected in the glass. She closes her eyes and pauses before opening them again as she wonders whom of all her dead her mind would summon for Bone Grinder’s pleasure.

“I don’t know,” says Bone Grinder.

The lines on her ancient face grow deeper and bluer in her reflection. They thicken into blurred words written in smudged ink. “I don’t know what happened to you,” says Miss Giddy, her face taunt with worry, “to the sweet girl I taught to dream.”

“Now, now,” Furiosa chuckles, shoving down the flicker of guilt forming in her belly. “Let’s not take too much credit. I’ve never been sweet.” She notes the subtle smirk on Max’s face. “And ‘taught me to dream?’ What kind of hogwash is that?”

The Giddy vision bristles. Real Miss Giddy would have shaken her head and asked her if she knew what _hogwash_ even was, certain that Furiosa thought it was about the motorcycle and not the animal. For Giddy everything was a teaching moment. Instead, this Giddy says, “I don’t think I know who you are anymore.”

“I do.”

“The girls told me you’re called Bag of Nails in the Wasteland,” says ghost Giddy.

“Yes, that’s true.” A scrape on Furiosa’s face shifts and darkens in her reflection to form the words _BAG OF NAILS_. “It’s not bad, as far as nicknames go. It’s a bit like… what was it you said the ancients used for a woman like me?”

“Virago,” says Giddy, and the word forms from a scratch on Furiosa’s skin. “It's an imperfect approximation though… lots of cultural baggage.” That sounded more realistic.

“That’s the one. I’m doing the ancient Amazons proud.” Except she's not; she knows she isn't, no more than any Amazon would ever wear the virago label with pride, but she lies to herself firmly enough that the word appears just the same: _AMAZON_. She stares as the word and studies its crisply chiseled letters. “I never thanked you for teaching us about them. I know I didn’t show it at the time…”

The Giddy ghost chuckles like the real Giddy would, “You were a bit of a ‘holy terror’ as they used to say.”

“Still am.” Her voice softens as she looks back to Max to gauge us reaction. The realisation that this is the closest he will ever come to meeting Giddy knocks the wind out of her. “Ain’t that right, Max?” She nudges him with her elbow. She hopes he can see and hear all of this: Miss Giddy like she really was. He would have liked Giddy, Furiosa decides, and liked getting lost in one of her stories. “This is Miss Giddy. She stayed behind when we left the Citadel even though everything was her fault.”

"I just call them like I see them,” Miss Giddy declares smugly. “It would have been a shame to let all that _desert power_ go to waste.”

“Anyway, I’d like to say thank you.” Giving her gratitude words does feel good if not a little too intimate to be performed so openly. 

The Giddy ghost looks down, “I do wish I would have gone with you. Then at least I would have died among friends. I wish I could have met your people.” She looks up, her eyes glimmering, “Real Amazons!” 

Furiosa clenches her fist and savours the little pain of her nails against her palm. “I don’t think reality would have meet your expectations.”

“That's the nature of reality. Stories follow structures, neat little arcs. Real life just does as it will. “ Miss Giddy shakes her head, “All those boys, lost for nothing.”

“I wouldn't say that,” Furiosa snaps defensively, but she's not quickly enough: _TRAITR_ , the word etches itself into Furiosa’s flesh along the curve of her neck.

“But you do have to wonder: could you have convinced them to side with you?” 

Then _BOSS_ forms and _MURDR_ beneath it, both in sharp, heavy, Warboy lettering, each stroke forcefully repeated to make the lines bold and angry like curses scratched into stone. “No, I couldn't have.”

“But the one you brought to me…”

“Kai. He was different; he knew he wasn't suited for Valhalla, real or not. He belongs to your world of books.”

“And you made this decision for him, for all of them. In Furiosa we trusted. What did that get us?” Giddy’s tone is neither angry nor accusatory. She has the air of a philosopher baffled by an unintelligible world.

"Your own damn fault,” Furiosa mutters. “You all should have known better.”

The words come faster now: _FILTH, FAILURE_. They form in her own hurried writing from her cuts and scars and bruises, _IMPERATOR, IRON CLAW, BARREN_ , every true and terrible word she's ever been called or called herself. _IRREPARABLE_. 

“We are so very much alike, you and I, legendary women keeping the company of the dead,” says Bone Grinder, her own face now reflected in the glass and filled with words of her own: _BABA YAGA, BONE GRINDER, MURDERER, STORM BREWER, CROW MOTHER, CARION MISTRESS, UNDEAD, HAG, LA BEFANA, JUDGE, MARZANNA, THE MORRIGAN, CALLEACHAN, IRON TOOTH_. “At least I know myself and my place in the world.” 

Furiosa’s words are still forming, some shared with Bone Grinder like _HUNTRESS, WITCH, CRONE, NAUGHTY, BROKEN, COMEBACK, and IMMORTAN_ , some hers alone like WAR BITCH, HELCUNT, and _DURABLE_. The last carves itself into the hollow under her jaw where Joe liked to hold her when he thought he was being gentle. 

Furiosa shudders, and Max moves closer to her, his hands firmly but secretly pressing into her shoulder blades. “Look,” she commands as more and more words fill her skin. If he could just see, she would’t have to say how she’s a _SCOURGE, GIRL TRAFFICKER, RAPE ENABLER, BLOOD THIEF, UNWOMAN_. Each is darker than the last. Thick letters shine black and brilliant like wet ink for a time then blend together, the words overlapping. 

“Someone needs to clean up this place,” Bone Grinder continues. “I’m just doing my job.”

"Look!" Furiosa snarls again, but Max is crouching behind her chair and pressing his forehead to the rear of her skull.

“No,” he huffs, his breath rushing across the scarred skin on the back of her neck. “You look.”

The words are still coming, but the handwriting is different, now large and rounded, careful but clumsy: _BLACK ANNES_ then _ROAD WARRIOR, FURIOSA,_ and _SURVIVOR, SHARP SHOOTER, PROTECTOR, BOLT CUTTER, VUVALINI, QUEEN_. They’re coming so quickly now her skin can hardly keep up. _DETERMINED, STRONG, STUBBORN, BEAUTIFUL, CUNNING, BRAVE_.

She squeezes her eyes shut to keep them from overflowing. Her skin may be able to keep up, barely, but she can’t, not at all. “Please.” She shakes her head; some things are not meant to be seen. But she lets her eyes open long enough to see two new words: _FURY,_ and _GOD KILLER_. “That’s enough,” she murmurs then pulls herself up to standing. One more word, _DEMMORTANIZOR_ appears scrawled across her face in her own brisk lettering before she draws her hand across her face and wipes them all away. They blend into each other and spread across her skin in a thinning layer that gradually fades into the flesh whence it came. 

Furiosa draws a long, slow breath as she bores into Bone Grinder with her gaze. She has no time to tuck away her raw edges. "What about you, Marzanna,” she asks, “What happened to you that you became Bone Grinder?” 

“It doesn't matter. We are what we are.”

Furiosa shakes her head like Miss Giddy used to, neither condescending nor vindictive, disappointed maybe but not surprised. “Do you even remember?” She decides against clicking her tongue and instead holds Bone Grinder firmly in her gaze. 

Bone Grinder shifts her weight anxiously then looks away, turning towards the window while her own collection of words scatters from her face like dust. She runs her hand along her torn neck so the tears in her skin move against her fingers as they paint trails of blood. “I remember.”

Max steps out slowly from behind Furiosa like a shadow cast by a moving lantern. He presses his fingers against his thighs, rubbing their tips against the leather. Then he leans closer to the window so it reflects the fresh bruises on his face. “What did you do to me?” He speaks quietly, his voice cracking at first; then it finds its clarity. 

Bone Grinder scrunches her face into what could be a wince or a sneer or something else entirely. Furiosa counts her own breaths and forces the corners of her mouth to lift. “Is something the matter?”

Bone Grinder folds her arms over her chest as if gathering herself. “No. Why would you think that?”

“Then let’s return to the task at hand. We would like to leave.” She shifts back so Max take her position at the table. “Clearly I have no place here.”

“You knew what I was,” Max protests. “Why did yo think you could keep me here?” 

Furiosa slips behind him to hide the smile in her eyes: he's hitting his stride, even speaking in complete sentences. Acting is a useful talent, and it’s a logical one for him to have even if the possibility never occurred to her. But when he’s alone… she supposes he has to make his own team. She gives the side of his arm a firm and encouraging touch as she wonders which _headmate_ he’s channeling. 

Max jerks away from her touch. “You knew the world needed me, and yet you would have kept me to yourself.” His voice brims with barely but confidently controlled rage. “And them what? You kept me the only way you knew how.”

Bone Grinder rises, her body mirroring her voice. “What did you expect?" she spits at him. "I had nothing but you. No life, no purpose, no meaning, just you and this house were everything I had.”

“So you took it out on me,” he says, his voice cooling between his gritted teeth. “So here we are… How do you like your _job_.” He spits the last word at her as if it were poison. “You clean the wasteland of the naughty and the dead. People like you.” 

Furiosa watches Bone Grinder squirm under the weight of her own tricks. “You seem to be mistaken,” Furiosa states, her eyes carefully trained on Bone Grinder.

“Mistaken?” Bone Grinder hisses. “I’m afraid not. There’s no one left who doesn’t fit my mandate.” She turns again to Max’s reflection. “You were the last. How else could you bring greenery where ever you went?” 

That last part might as well be true. If there was ever a person who brought springtime with his step… 

“And now it’s all gone,” Max whispers. 

Furiosa knows Max can’t keep up the charade much longer; he's staggering under the weight of it. She sees it in the quiver of his lip; she hears it in the shallowness of his breath. He’ll either say something incorrect and lose hold of this character he’s conjuring by fumbling guesses, or he’ll lose himself in it. She doesn’t know which would be worse. 

She seizes the moment. “Then it seems we’ve reached an impasse. What will it take for you to let us go?”

"It was for you.” Max hits the table with his fist. “Every leaf was for you. We could have been happy.”

“Happy?” Bone Grinder hisses. “You betrayed me. After that, what happiness was left for us?” 

“Nothing – you made sure of it.” Max settles into the chair and folds his arms so he’s gripping his biceps trough his jacket.

Furiosa watches for her to break, but she is still and silent. Max, however, is fighting to keep his seams together. His eyes dart. His fingers twitch. He wets his lips between sharp breaths and hooks his feet around the chair legs. 

“I know,” Bone Grinder finally says. “I miss you.” Her voice comes out small and almost girlish, painted with blush and shame. Then even more softly: “I want to go with you.” 

Furiosa takes Bone Grinder’s hand and promises, “I am the De-immortanizor; _my_ job is to help.”

"Can you?" Bone Grinder demands in quiet desperation. 

Furiosa looks to Max who gives an exhausted nod. "I'll try, On the condition that we are free to leave afterwards… regardless of the outcome."

Bone Grinder presses lips together as she looks down and then up again. “Agreed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Saying that _virago_ comes with cultural baggage is a bit of an understatement, but it fits so nicely with Citadel conceptions of gender. Given that Furiosa is still in the process of relearning appreciation for her womanity, any positive statement about her particular place on the gender spectrum is a step forward for her.
> 
> Of course, "Desert Power," comes from Frank Herbert's _Dune_ , which was Furiosa's favorite book when she was in the Vault. 
> 
> Furiosa brought a Warboy to Miss Giddy so he could train under her as part of the escape plan because they both knew that helping the wives escape would leave no one to protect Giddy's library and carry on her history work. This Warboy, named Kai, becomes the wordburger we see in the comics.
> 
> I headcanon that Joe named Furiosa _Durable_ when she was a wife. 
> 
> _Unwoman_ is here as an allusion to Margaret Atwood's _The Handmaid's Tale_ because it's such a perfect, inherently misogynistic, made-up word. I'm sure Miss Giddy had a copy of the book, but I feel like it's a bit too on-the-nose for her to have included it in her lessons.


	12. Almost as Many Ways to Die (as There are to be Dead)

“Then we do it outside,” says Furiosa, her head reeling with the insanity of the situation. How the fuck is she supposed to kill someone who can’t be killed? Clearly stabbing won’t work; shes already tried that. This woman is the real thing, immortan and dissatisfied. “We go out now.” And when Furiosa inevitably fails, she knows better than to count on Bone Grinder releasing them as promised. “Make any preparations you must.”

“None needed,” says Bone Grinder. She stands and glides across the rotating floor. “Well, move along,” she calls back to Max and Furiosa.

Furiosa moves to the other side of the table and leans across. “You did it. She’s letting us go.”

He responds with a quick succession of blinks. Then his eyes finally focus, and he sighs. “After we kill her.”

“After we try. I was hoping you might have some ideas. What do the stories say?”

He stands and scoots his chair under the table. He hums as he leans against it pensively, no doubt trying to sift through ages of sand to find tells long buried. “Need a minute,” he finally admits.  
A minute they don’t have – “Think while we walk,” she says as she walks away, pausing only to grab another of the white cloth and wrap it around her shoulders.

The rotating floor is as unsettling as ever, but Furiosa shoves down her wooziness and fangs across for the last time. Max follows, still mauling over ways to kill undead people. He counts them off silently on his fingers.

Bone Grinder opens the glass so they can step onto the awaiting platform. They do eagerly, glad to put this place behind them. Furiosa squeezes her eyes closed to make them adjust to the darkness more quickly, but when she opens them again, between the crows and the clouds, the sky is too dark to read, and the moon has already set. She reasons that dawn can’t be too far off, which will make finding the cars again easier.

“How will you do it?” asks Bone Grinder. “There are almost as many ways to die as there are to be dead.”

“Fire…” says Max. “Bullet to the head… steak to the heart… drowning.” 

Considering the physical damage she’s already inflicted on Bone Grinder, Furiosa doesn’t think the bullet or the steak will do much good. “We have water,” she muses, “special water.”

"From the underworld.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“No, it really is,” Bone Grinder insists. She looks down at the stream wistfully. 

Furiosa grips the platform side as she leans out to get a better look. The water isn’t terrible deep, but it doesn’t take much, for an ordinary person in ordinary water at least. They’ll hold Bone Grinder face down until she stops twitching. It’s as good a plan as any. 

“That’s the way then,” Furiosa declares. “We’ll send you down to your husband.”

“I’ve tried already,” says Bone Grinder.

"I haven't.”

Furiosa doesn’t even wait for the platform to stop before she jumps of, momentarily forgetting about her injured leg. It protests, and she stumbles on the landing, but she’s so glad to be on solid ground she doesn’t mind. 

Bone Grinder smiles as she walks to the fence of bones surrounding her yard. “You’ll need this,” she says, lifting a skull with a flame in its mouth, “for your journey home.” She hands it to Furiosa who passes it off to Max along with the white cloth from the table.. 

“Are you ready?” she asks Bone Grinder.

She nods and her eyes glisten with tears. She starts to speak then retreats to a second silent nod. She walks into the stream and stands as it bubbles around her, tugging at the hems of her skirt and her cloak. She lowers herself to her knees and then to sitting. The dark currents lap at her thighs. 

Furiosa joins her in the water. It’s cold, cold enough even through her boots to makes her muscles tighten and her breath catch. She centres herself and takes her position behind Bone Grinder. Max stands on the bank, ready to lean in to help as needed while keeping his brace dry. But Furiosa is the Demmortanizor; this is her task.

“Better make it quick,” says Bone Grinder through chattering teeth. Then she stretches out so she’s lying on her belly. 

Furiosa says nothing. She takes a long, slow breath, drawing air deep into her belly and straddles Bone Grinder. She leans all her weight onto Bone Grinder’s chest and braces her arms against the woman’s head, her hand cupping the curve of her skull and her stump at her neck. She waits while the water numbs her skin.

“Ever seen a drowning?” Max whispers in Furiosa’s ear.

“Not in progress,”she answers. 

“Know what will happen?”

“Mm-hmm, like waterboarding.”

Bone Grinder is perfectly still until she isn't. Then her body erupts into motion, her back arcing and arms flapping. She thrusts her head upward into Furiosa’s palm, and Furiosa drives it down – down into the dark and the cold, down into the muck, down to the underworld where is water and green, endless green. 

This is just another killing, one of many, one far more merciful than most. It shouldn’t effect like her like this, but Furiosa’s chest tightens, and her belly aches. It’s probably because this death is so intimate or because she knows the way a face twists in agony beneath wet cloth. Maybe it’s the way she can feel this long dead woman’s survival instinct through every jerking movement. Mercy killing… execution… its all relative.

Then the jerking stops. Bone Grinder’s chest expands, filling with water. Her feathered cape ripples as her body quivers, and all the lights on her spinning house flicker to the same rhythmless sequence. Furiosa feels the vibrations in her bones 

"Done,” says Max eases his weight off of Furiosa. 

She nods, certain she can’t quite use her voice yet. She didn’t even notice his hands on her back. She stands slowly and then steps out of the water, her soul as numb as her feet. Max wraps the white cloth around her and rubs her hand between his. 

"Let's go," she finally says once she’s her head is clear enough for words. 

Just then the crows that have been hovering overhead descend in a storm of pounding black wings and darting, tearing beaks and claws. They fang for Bone Grinder, but then the murder splits with half ripping into Bone Grinder while the others head for Max and Furiosa. He bolts, leaving Furiosa and the skull lantern behind as he shoots out the open gate of bones. The crows are faster. 

She grabs the lantern and runs after him. She holds out the skull letting its small flame light her path, but she could be just following the noise. The thunder of wings and the lightning of caws drown out everything else. _Bwumm, bwumm_ the whole world seems to pulse with their rhythm.

Max drops to the ground and draws himself up. His right leg tucks up easily, but the left catches in the dust. He tugs at it with his hands and swats at the birds who dart for it, but there are too many. He hisses and snarls at the first few talons and beaks to tear his clothing and growls at the first few to draw blood. 

“Hey!” Furiosa waves the lantern at the birds as she enters the black cloud and shouts, “He’s alive!” because after everything that’s happened, the birds understanding her words would be less surprising than not. 

Her mind is reeling as she swats the birds away. They seem to show no interest in her; they dodge her limbs and dive towards Max’s huddled form. He interlaces his fingers behind his head and presses his face into the ground, but the crows still find openings. Where there are none, they make their own.

So Furiosa dives onto him. “I’ve got you,” she whispers as she curls her body around his. He whimpers as his torn skin presses against hers. “I’ve got you,” she repeats, and she feels his back expanding into her chest as he breathes, so very much alive and hurting so much she aches for him. 

But the crows keep coming. They dart and duck around her. They swat her away with their wings and talons but never marking her flesh. Max screams when they find an especially tender spot, and she tears away all the birds she can catch, but there are just so many. She snarls at them, but they squawk back with supernatural ferocity. She wishes she were large enough to cover all of him.

Furiosa snarls in frustration and takes the head of the next bird she catches. He’s clearly not dead; he’s clearly suffering, and the dead don’t suffer. She remembers what Bone Grinder said about reading him, and in the frantic chaos her mind turns to tea leaves and how Bone Grinder swirled the dregs in her cup. 

Bone Grinder’s voice rings in her mind, “There are almost as many ways to die as there are to be dead.”

Furiosa falls into understanding as if it were a hole in the ground she didn’t see coming. It startles her with its simplicity and clarity. She thinks of how Bone Grinder stood behind her with vacant expression while her past tortured her and how, despite being in the same place and drinking the same water, Max was miraculously unaffected. – Because he always sees and hears people who aren’t there. It’s not that Bone Grinder’s tricks don’t affect him; it’s that the affects are _nothing new_. Bone Grinder wanted to feel Furiosa’s suffering; now her crows needs to feel Max’s so they know he's still alive. Furiosa knows what she has to do. 

She holds him tightly with all her limbs, no longer bothering to swat the birds away. He’s almost still now, just twitching as he moans or whimpers, and she knows she doesn’t have much time. She smoothes his hair, soft and brown like a desert mouse where it isn’t matted with blood or dust. 

The words stir aches in her before she speaks them. “I’m sorry,” she huffs into her ear. “ I found a picture in your car tucked between the seats. There were two women with curly hair. Who were they, Max? They looked so beautiful, so very happy, like the happiest people in the world.”

He squirms beneath her. His fingers twist and tug at the hair at the base of his skull. The crows hover around them like a fog; feathers brush their skin. 

“What happened to them, Max?” Words rise up in her like sickness, tearing at her belly and her throat and scraping at her eyes and nose as they make their way out. “Why didn’t you help them? Why didn’t you save them?” 

Max shudders beneath her and groans like an earthquake. Every torn bit of flesh and cloth and leather fits itself back together as it quivers. His shudders become sobs, and his whimpers grow into moans and then into roars. 

When he swings at her she doesn’t move. She lets the side of his fist connect with her skull and knock her to the ground as he rolls. It’s a good hit but no more than she deserves. She sits stunned and dazed, her eyes fighting to focus on something other than the black spots that aren’t hovering crows.

“I’m sorry,” she says again. She knows the way he is writhing. She knows there is nothing she can do. So she sits by him in the quiet of the early morning – no more crows, no more Bone Grinder, just two broken people and the distant chassis of a broken car silhouetted against a rising sun.

### 

Another ride back to the Citadel – this time the haul is sizeable, and it should be worth the trouble, but Furiosa can’t quite convince herself. She’s curled up, sharing Mr. T's back seat with the skull lantern, and too exhausted to do anything other than survive her hangover. It’s that especially brutal variety that adrenaline, not alcohol leaves, behind along with a haze of doubts and regrets. 

Those are what turn her stomach and make her head pound, but the fact that she keeps craning her neck to catch a glimpse of Max can’t be helping either. He’s said hardly a word to anyone, which in an of itself is hardly remarkable, but Furiosa knows this is different the same way she knows it is her fault. 

He’d lumbered several paces behind her in cold silence despite her ever irritating limp and then shut himself in the Interceptor without a word. Furiosa started to follow, but she stopped to gather their things from the dust. Then she stood by the Interceptor, just outside the blanket curtains they’d made seemingly days ago. She was hovering there when the wind shifted the fabric just enough for her to catch a glimpse inside. 

His face contorted as he pressed his hand between the leather seats. Then he stopped, his chest frozen mid-heave, his breath caught somewhere inside. The upholstery parted easily for its master and returned the slip of slick paper to its rightful owner. He didn’t look at it though; instead his red, wet eyes met hers. 

She wanted so desperately to tell him how sorry she was that any of this had happened. She wanted to tell him that everything would work out, but she couldn’t make her mouth form the lie; sometimes there’s no right way for everything to be. Sometimes all the ways are wrong.

She simply mouthed the words, “I’m here,” and then when he turned his back to her, she retreated to one of the Buzzard cars to wait for their lift home.

“For fuck sake,” Toast grumbles, dragging Furiosa back to the present, “go to sleep. You’re making me anxious.” 

There's a part of Furiosa, a small but distinct part, that thinks that nothing out of the ordinary happened. She could have just stumbled upon the skull lantern and dreamt up an adventure for how she ended up clutching it to her chest a couple hundred meters down the gully from the wreck. She runs her fingers over the pale, sun-bleached bone, very much solid, very much real.

Furiosa sighs and hugs her thighs more tightly against her belly. She thinks she sees Max on a similar position. Riding in a towed car can’t be comfortable. Then again, she can’t be quite sure she’s watching him and not just a shadow. She can’t be sure of much of anything at the moment except for how the Citadel will arise in the windscreen too soon.


End file.
